The Advantages of Being Middle-Sized

From the viewpoint of business and industry, the larger cities have clear advantages: cheaper and more flexible transportation and utility systems, better research and development facilities, a more skilled and varied labor supply, and better facilities for educating and retraining workers. These economies of scale are captured by private business as lower private costs; many of the attendant social costs, such as additional traffic congestion and air pollution, are sloughed off on society. In themselves, these factors would tend to promote urban growth and great size.

But other forces work in the opposite direction. They originate for the most part in the household sector. Alarms of an urban crisis are almost invariably couched in the color words of amenities: congestion, pollution and other aspects of bigness, or at least poorly managed bigness. It is, in fact, not at all clear from this largely impressionistic (and frequently impassioned) literature whether the hypothesized rising costs and/or deteriorating quality of urban life with greater scale is due to some naturally scarce factor, such as fresh air or clean water, or due instead to the probable or demonstrated failure of urban public policy and management.

To date, the most that can be made of these popular problems of great city size is that they have slowed slightly the growth of the largest urban areas: in the United States, probably New York and less clearly Chicago. But, paradoxically, the loss of amenities with great size may redound to support the growth of the second echelon of metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas with over a million population but less than Chicago's 8 million offer substantial infrastructure in support of modern business although they do not rival New York and Chicago on this score. But then neither are their problems quite as big.

We could argue that New York must wrestle with a somewhat more advanced form of each of the classic urban problems, or we could argue alternatively the equivalent: that New York must face each new problem in urban management first. Thus, New York was the first to have to learn how to handle 10 million people, and must soon be the first to master the problems posed by 20 million. Each successively smaller city, roughly in its rank order, has one more example from which to profit, whether the examples be good or bad. Chicago finds the path a little easier because New York has done it before, and Detroit profits from the pioneering of both. Detroit, that is, should be able to offer in 1970 a better organized version of the 5-million population cluster, as a partial offset to the disadvantages it suffers living in the shadow of the greater choice and urbanity of Chicago.

A good case can be made that each of the two dozen or so urban areas with a million to 5 million population will net out to about an average growth rate over the next fifty years, and more than double in size. New York and Chicago will pave the way, perhaps at a slowing rate. All this assumes, of course, the absence of national policy that would restrict the continued growth of big cities. And at this time and vantage point, it seems likely that our national policy will be directed more toward mastering the management of large population clusters than toward preventing their growth.