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Feature Essay
Perry Duis What is a city? On the surface this may seem like a simple question. Of course, it is an accumulation of people and buildings on the landscape. But a place like Chicago, Rockford, or Springfield is much more than that. It is really a series of intriguing questions. First of all, why were there cities? There were two basic reasons. Some places have always functioned primarily as government centers. Vandalia and Springfield, Illinois' capital cities, as well as the county seats, have been home to courts, jail houses, and other government functions. Frequently located near the center of the county, many places in this category never developed beyond the size of villages. But most cities in Illinois were created for economic reasons. Galena, for instance, grew to be the leading city during the 1820s because of the presence of lead ore that could easily be smelted into many useful products. Other cities grew out of the need to trade. When the state was in its early decades, there were many small villages where farmers sold their surplus crops. Some of these towns, in turn, developed into manufacturing towns, such as Rockford, Sterling, Elgin, and Peoria. Their river locations provided the water power to drive the machinery that milled grain, sawed wood, and carried out other simple manufacturing processes. By the 1850s the natural advantages of a river location became far less important when steam power replaced water wheels. But many of these places had already been established, and new factories wanted to be near raw materials, which were still transported by boat, as well as close to concentrations of skilled workers. Chicago was a special case. Initially, it grew because the mouth of its river opened onto the south-westernmost location on the Great Lakes. This was very important in an era when water transportation was the fastest and easiest way to get from here to there. Explorers and visionaries also looked at the other end of the south branch of the Chicago River and noted how easy it would be to dig a short canal to the Des Plaines River. The latter flowed into the Illinois River, which, in turn, reached the Mississippi. Unfortunately, the job of digging the Illinois and Michigan Canal was more difficult than anticipated. It was not completed until 1848. At the other end of the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, which had been opened twenty-three years earlier, linked Lake Erie at Buffalo with the Hudson River, which ran to the ocean at New York City. Chicago thus became a critical link in a transportation chain that extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Meanwhile, just as the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened, Chicagoans were seizing the opportunity to build railroads to the west. Farmers were
eager to find a way to ship their grain and livestock to Chicago, where it could be processed and transported to eager buyers in the East. Those rail lines fanned out across Illinois, linking virtually every county in the state to Chicago, which emerged as the nation's railway hub. The city's transportation advantage, in turn, drew factories of every type to the Chicago area, whose economy became the most diverse in the nation. Decades later, as the railroads showed signs of decline, Chicago wisely promoted Municipal (later Midway) Airport and built O'Hare into the nation's most important air hub. But while economic reasons might explain why cities exist, there are factors that explain how they function. Basically, everything revolves around the question of what can and cannot be done by large groups of people concentrated in a limited space. First of all, cities must regulate behavior to keep people from annoying or even hurting each other. City ordinance books are filled with laws regulating vehicle speeds, garbage disposal, food sales, noise, and other things that are of far less concern to people living on farms. In the matter of animals, for instance, cities had to differentiate between pets and farm animals, which were increasingly unwelcome as cities grew. (Mrs. O'Leary may have kept her famous cow within a mile of the center of Chicago, but we cannot blame its supposed misbehavior in starting the Great Fire of 1871 for the fact that there are no cattle in the city today!) Cities must also have elaborate building codes to insure that the places where people live, work, shop, play, and go to school are safe; the failure to do so could cost many lives. Population growth also complicated the question of how the space within its borders is divided and used. On a farm, there is a clear differentiation between the privately owned space of the farmland and the publicly owned road. But as villages, then towns, then cities develop, a new category begins to emerge. This is "semi-public space" which is privately owned but generally accessible to the public. In a village, it may be a general store, gas station, or church. But in a major city there is an endless collection of semi-public places: restaurants, department stores, train stations, airports, theaters, hotels, nightclubs, offices, and cathedrals, among others. While such spaces make urban living vibrant and interesting, they have created interesting problems. For years, cities have struggled with questions of defining public access and safety, as well as regulating the behavior of those who use them. Such questions as liability in elevator accidents and the rights of the homeless to enter shopping malls are modern versions of old questions. There is much more to city life than the somewhat dismal idea of regulation. Concentrations of people can make good things happen that would be nearly impossible among dispersed populations. For example, let's say that one out of every ten people wants to see the live performance of classical music. In a village of a hundred, the ten people could do little. In a city of ten thousand, the thousand music lovers might be able to support a small semi-professional ensemble. But in a city like Chicago, its population of 2.75 million (with 275,000 hypothetical classical music fans) maintains something as great as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The same principal allows larger cities to have art galleries, bookstores, department stores, fine restaurants, major newspapers, zoos, and many other things that need the presence and support of concentrations of population. This same principle of concentration has also allowed cities to become centers of knowledge and information, whether it be grain prices, world events, or entertainment. Years ago, citizens would gather around the boat dock to hear the latest news from those arriving because they were the central source of knowledge about the outside world. Then came the telegraph office, and with it the newspaper, the book and magazine publishers and stores, the college, the museum, and the public library. In the electronic age, the city became the home of the radio station, which had the advantage of being able to reach out to the farms and small towns. Television added a visual image. What we have seen is that cities in general represent a notion that concentration is not only logical but good, whether it be of people, economic activity; or culture. In order to enjoy the advantages of that concentration, city dwellers over the years have had to give up a certain measure of freedom. They have been willing to tolerate living in more compact quarters, taking a crowded bus to work, or even encountering danger or unpleasantness. On the whole, however, cities have not done well in recent decades. They have lost population, jobs, and prestige. Why? First, economic factors beyond their control have replaced manufacturing jobs with machines or sent employment overseas; this has contributed to myriad social problems that have made many others want to leave for the relative safety of the suburbs. As service-sector jobs displace industrial employment, the luckiest cities have been those with concentrations of offices, universities, and research labs. A second problem is that the physical city built by people in one era becomes a troublesome artifact to people in the next; often, we are left with the painful decision of what to do with the buildings and institutions left by people long gone. Should a structure be preserved as an architectural or historical landmark, or should it be torn down to make way for a structure that promises to bring jobs? Should a church remain active long after most of its parishioners have moved away? These survivals are related to a third problem. Most of the larger cities were built during a time when most people traveled about on public transit. Urban streets have had a particularly difficult time accommodating the automobile, which requires
much more space to carry each rider than a train or bus. Cities have had to destroy thousands of buildings to build expressways and widen streets. The auto also makes it possible to travel greater distances in less time and with greater flexibility of route. The car is also the major reason why suburban or even rural deconcentration now seems more logical to some people than urban concentration. Faced with traffic jams, it seems more logical to replace the downtown skyscraper office building with the suburban office campus, the department store with the mall, and the apartment building with the suburban housing development. A perception of danger and a desire to pursue a suburban lifestyle of a single-family home with a yard instead of an apartment have all contributed to deconcentration. As a result, many of the traditional downtown stores, offices, and other semi-public places that brought people together have become endangered. Electronic communications present perhaps the most significant new threat to the traditional city. This is because the traditional urban function of collecting and disseminating information can take place anywhere. There is no sense of place, no logic of concentration on the so-called Information Superhighway. Cyberspace has no city. Fifty or one hundred years from now, someone might ask: "What is a city?" What do you think the answer will be?
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