A Hopeful View of the Urban Problem

ONE has heard so much of late years about the exodus from the country, in the United States, that it is time someone pointed out. that no such exodus has taken place. Individuals leave some country places for t he city or other country places, but generally speaking the country is gaining inhabitants at a fairly rapid rate. These are not figures of speech, but rather figures from the Census. The Census defines country places now as all those with less than 2500 people in a single settlement, and states that there were in 1910 over four million more people in them than in 1900. If one cares to look further back, in the last thirty years the country people have increased by more than fourteen millions. As to rate of increase, our country dwellers have increased in the last decade by eleven per cent. The whole German Empire, cities and all, has only increased by thirteen. The American exodus from the country is one of the three great myths of the nineteenth century!

There are counties in which country people are diminishing. There are even ten states out of our forty-eight which show losses of country people. These are Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont . Their losses in the decade were 469,702. But the gains of the other thirty-eight states were so great that the whole country had 4,963,959 more country people in 1910 than in 1900. These figures are taken from a recent bulletin of the Thirteenth Census entitled ‘ Population of Cities.’ It divides the United States into nine districts, in two of which the country had losses: 5150 in New England, and 4220 in the East North Central States. The other seven gained: the Mid-Atlantic 445,558, the West North Central 439,446, South Atlantic 996,979, East South Central 474,205, West South Central, 1,456,524, the Mountain States 586,681, and the Pacific States 573,930.

Men and families have been lost to the country, but for one that has gone nine have come. Our population is a shifting one; many of those whom we see leaving one country district have merely gone to swell the country dwellers elsewhere. The facts observed are not those habitually stated.

What is really happening is an extraordinary upspringing and growth of cities. We had 1894 cities in 1900. In 1910 these had become 2405, and their inhabitants had increased from thirtyone and a half to forty-two and a half millions, a gain of thirty-five per cent. If we look back thirty years instead of ten we shall see 1102 cities become 2405 and a population of 14,772,438 grow to 42,623,383. This is the spark of fire behind so much smoke. Rural population is growing fairly well, but cities are growing by leaps and bounds. Not an exodus from the country but the development of cities has been the phenomenon of the generation.

Now, this thing that has been happening is natural and normal in a nation taking possession of a land. We should not fail to not e that the number of cities has grown as well as their population. Not merely are they three times as populous at the end of the decade as at the beginning, but over twice as numerous. The public mind has thought of the cities as if they had always been there, over against the country and independent of it; as if in matters concerning the growth of population everything were possible, — that the cities might have grown slower than the country, or that it was in some way to be expected that town and country should normally grow alike. As a matter of fact, our cities are the outcome of the growth of country population; are an outgrowth of the needs of the country people, first for exchange and distribution of products, second for some working over and manufacturing of those products; and they must grow faster than the country population that creates them, from the conditions of modern life and industry.

Thirty years ago, more than half our cities did not exist. The new ones number no less than 1303. These have not been ‘gone to’ by people from the country, but have just grown on their sites out of rural communities. Of course, part of the number is fictitious. With the discrimination between rural and urban communities at 2500, a ‘country’ community of 2490 becomes a ‘city’ on adding ten new inhabitants without any change of character. But the total increase in number of cities of from 2500 inhabitants to 5000 is only 563. Not all of these can have just grown over the limiting size as suggested, and they leave over 700 to be accounted for as new.

With us, cities are as sure to spring up with the increase of country population as the forests are to disappear. City and country are organically related. Crops cannot be grown without fields, nor exchanged and manufactured under the modern system of division of labor, without cities. Only in the rudest pioneer settlements do men dispense with this division of labor by doing everything painfully and badly on the farm. Such settlements are retarded and hampered until they have towns for the city part of the work. When we estimate that the average inhabitant of New York may have but a few score square feet for his own use, we are apt to forget that he can only exist on them because somewhere in the country there are acres of ground producing for him, as really and definitely for him as if he owned them and hired the labor on them, — what Professor Penck has called his ‘sustenance space.’

In this connection it is remarkable that twenty of the twenty-two cities which have doubled in population in the last ten years are in the South and West; and that only one of these, Los Angeles, had 100,000 in 1900. Almost all of them, therefore, are small new growths in the agricultural parts of the country. The two northern cities are Schenectady, New York, and Flint, Michigan. Flint owes its overgrowth to the same automobile boom that has lifted Lansing and Detroit also out of their former class.

Where the author lives, in southern Michigan, the farms of from forty to eighty acres have their houses strung along the highways at considerable distances. At road corners every few miles we may find a little cluster of them by a church or a school-house, and especially by a country corner-store. This is important in the life of the whole district for its social opportunities, but it lives on its usefulness as a point of local supply and collection. Here eggs and butter are brought from all the farms around. Every one obtains here his flour, sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene, lamps, common plates, rough cloth and clothing, hammers and nails; the things that some one within a few miles is certain to want every day. At longer intervals one comes on villages with better goods in larger assortments; things not so constantly needed; so that a wider clientéle must be appealed to for their sale. In the same way every county has its little city, with banks and higher schools and theatres and factories, and stores with costlier grades of furniture and clothing and objects of luxury. Here or in the village will be sold the farmer’s crop. To them he will look for the culture he wants in the form of religion, of education for his family, or of social intercourse and entertainment. Here he and his wife hope to spend t heir last days, with the farm rented or worked by some one on halves. Each of these grades of communities has been created by the settling of the region. Each has grown as more forest was cut away; villages have grown into little cities, little cities have grown into large ones in which manufacturing becomes more and more important with size, for only in the large ones are assured ease of movement of raw and manufactured material and a constant supply of labor of varied training and capacity. The few really strategic points in the whole country, for interchange of commodities, will foster the growth of a few cities to overwhelming size. But all of these cities alike have their roots in the country fields. If the country folk ever really take it into their heads to flock to the cities, no city can either last or grow.

In 1870, Michigan and Wisconsin together had but ten cities of ten thousand or more. In 1910 they had fortyone. In 1870 the only city of a hundred thousand inhabitants between Buffalo and the Mississippi was Chicago, then about as large as Cincinnati is to-day. Now there are five of them, and six more of over fifty thousand. In the better settled part of the region the cities were then a matter of a hundred miles apart, now they are barely twenty-five. These two states have nine hundred thousand more country people than they had thirty years ago. Their cities have increased by a million and a third in the same time, but it is the country increase that has made this possible. The total natural increase of the country population cannot remain on the farms without entailing a rapid subdivision of the farms.

Now, American farms are going to be smaller, but it will happen by the introduction of intensive methods of agriculture or by the taking up of the farms by Europeans who understand those methods. There are signs enough that the thing is happening already, but it is a slow process compared with the increase of the population. It is the nature of the case that the man in the field can raise the raw produce for seven or eight. That is about what he was doing in this country in 1900, and he will produce for more and more with every year. Between 1855 and 1894 the introduction of seven different machines used in raising and harvesting corn reduced the man-labor in a bushel of corn from four hours and thirtyfour minutes to forty-one minutes. For a bushel of wheat the similar reduction has been from three hours and three minutes to ten minutes. To get the same produce from the ground, one man in the field suffices where then sixteen were needed. Of course such an application of machinery is ideal, and not attained in wide practice. The essential farm population must always be thin, and if it becomes too dense, economic forces tend to thin it at once. But the operations connected with the manufacture and interchange of commodities need not be kept near the fields. On the contrary, they can best be carried on under the conditions of village and city life, at points well placed for power and transportation.

City population normally adds a portion of the natural increase of the population of the country to its own increase: it must grow faster than the country population does.

The modern census figures of many lands teach us that, extensive farming of the American type exists with population densities of from 25 to 125 to the square mile. That figure includes the cities that are sure to complement such farms. The actual country population in our great farming states is but 31 in a total population density for the same region of 43. The European, intensive style of farming, which puts more labor, more fertilizer, and more knowledge into smaller fields, and gets much larger crops from them, goes with populations of from 125 to 250 to the mile. Densities above 250 imply that manufacturing of raw materials from outside fields of supply is beginning to prevail; densities under 125 that the land is not completely farmed, but has portions in forest, or used for grazing, or too dry for any agricultural use, as in many of our western states. These occupational densities cannot be separated by sharply drawn lines, but if they are taken for wide enough areas they are really decisive. More than the average density for the occupation is overgrowth, and has to be compensated for by some special advantage or it causes distress. Any overgrowth in the country is at once drawn to the city by the varied possibilities for occupation there, aided by the attractiveness of city life that is always operative on the country, even on those profitably busied there.

To the density of city population there is hardly any limit. Some wards in New York are settled at the rate of five hundred thousand people to the mile; all Manhattan island averages about a hundred thousand, but this is, of course, mere ’home space.’

There are many difficulties in drawing distinctions between city and country, as we must for statistical purposes. I have tried to lay emphasis above rather on their interrelation and essential unity, yet the line must be drawn somewhere. It was General Francis A. Walker, Director of the Census in 1870, who suggested 8000 as a critical size; all communities with fewer inhabitants than that being defined as ‘ rural.’ The Twelfth Census reduced this number to 4000, the Thirteenth to 2500. What has been the effect of this change of standard on computations of country growth? Apparently to make country population seem to grow more slowly by about a fifth of its total amount. The Census gives us the total populations for cities of 100,000, for those of 25,000, of 10,000, of 5000, and of 2500. If we make the experiment of regarding each of these sizes in succession as a limiting size between country and city, we shall get for the country growth of the last decade the successive estimates, 16, 13, ll½, 10, and 9 per cent.; smaller values as you set the city limit further down. For this example I have taken no account of the passing of ‘rural’ communities into the ‘urban’ class during the decade. With this allowance — that is, counting the increase of population during the decade of the area that was rural in 1910, whether it stayed so or not — our nine goes up to eleven.

If the ‘city’ minimum were set a little lower, the case might be made to look worse yet for the country.

The reductions in the limit to 4000 and 2500 appear to have been made with the eyes rather on the rus than on the urbs. Is a place of 2500 really a city? The dweller in one of 100,000 will hardly think so. Form of government is of course not a satisfactory means of distinguishing; but surely there is some common element in the usual notion of city, citified, and urban that can be used in defining. I think the words carry for all of us the idea of paved streets, compactly and continuously closed in by permanent buildings several stories high and pretty crowded with people. Public parks do not interrupt the city concept at all, nor do waterways which are used for traffic. The community at the mouth of I he Charles is really one city, although governed by several mayors and councils.

Rural population lives in isolated houses. Such is the count ry population that I find widespread about here with a density of 31 to the square mile; but between this rural life and city life is another type, that of the village or small city. Village life is marked by a drawing together of homes; that is its distinetion from the true country. Perhaps the greatest hardship of country life is the lonesomeness, above all for the women. The village is built up by this country longing for society, and the village appears therefore as soon as two houses stand side by side. When they are so clustered and grouped that they have no farms annexed, it is plain that the village has arrived. The space occupied is an essential part of the idea. Not how many are the people, but how near together do they live? The Michigan General Laws are suggestive when they authorize the incorporation as a village of any community that has at least 300 people on at least one square mile of ground.

The city appears in the growth of the village when the increasing material nearness of men brings about social repulsions. It is the delight of moving to the village that I may have neighbors; of going to the city that I need not know who my neighbors are. Material crowding of men has brought evils in its train against which the city must defend itself. To prevent vehicles from sticking in the mud of heavily traveled streets, the streets must be paved, and as further defenses we must now have city lighting, policing, sewerage, and water supply, all because there are now so many of us so near together.

The blessings of the village become curses with further growth, unless ’city ’ remedies are applied. The very crowding brings a thinning out at the centre. In the heart of the great modern cities nobody lives but janitors and caretakers of store and office buildings. While each of the twenty-odd square miles of Manhattan Island has more than a hundred thousand residents, the business centre, in Wards Two and Three near the southern tip of the island, has less than seven thousand to the mile. The great example of course is London, with its old ‘City’ steadily dwindling; but more than that, the central fifth of the whole County of London has fewer inhabitants with each decade, as shops and offices take the place of homes.

Country people live in isolated homes, village homes are neighborly, and the city defends its inmates from neighbors who may not be desired. The fine cannot be sharply drawn between them; the best thing to use is the average from the fact s of many large cities. We learn from that how people do live in large cities.

From studies of many large cities in Europe as well as in America, it appears that a reasonable lower limit of density of population for a city is ten thousand people to a square mile. This is not far from the official average for American great cities.² All areas continuously settled at the rate of over ten thousand to the mile are cities; all areas less densely settled, villages, until the houses come to be isolated, when we have reached the country. This throws Charlottenburg in with Berlin, Hoboken and Jersey City with New York, and makes Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, and Brookline essential parts of Boston, with a total population this year, 1913, of nine hundred thousand people.

Most of our cities contain City part, Village part, and Country part. So does Vienna, but most European cities have expanded beyond their limits and citified their suburbs. London has invaded several counties.

The land has been settled, population has been developed slowly in the country, as befits the sparse agricultural occupation of the land; in the cities, rapidly, at the demand and under the stimulus of country development. No exodus from the country has occurred except as the country, exuberant and life-giving, brings forth a population in excess of agricultural needs. This it is always doing, and with this surplus it creates the cities that supplement and crown the life of the land.