Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The same forces that have successfully
produced the suburban American dream of
single-family homes, two cars in every garage,
and a better life have left many of the poor
behind in central-city locations. Poverty breeds
deterioration and despair, which feed on
themselves in the form of crime, ignorance, and
poor health. And so a downward spiral of life
perpetutates itself.
that the earlier cohort of suburbanisers attempt to
'raise the drawbridge' behind them by opposing
new development schemes in NIMBY (not in my
back yard) fashion and by campaigning for no-go
areas (e.g. green belts) and exclusionary zoning (see,
for instance, Murdoch and Marsden 1994) in an
effort to keep further growth to a small trickle of
the most wealthy!
Similar issues arise from the counterurbanisation
that can be prompted by restrictions on suburban
growth as well as arise from more deep-seated
forces, but the impacts of these longer-distance
moves from cities tend to be more complex and
diverse. In the first place, as with the suburbs, any
influx pushes up land and property prices, a rise
made all the sharper by the fact that previously these
areas will have been languishing in economic terms
and have had house prices attuned to what low-
income rural workers could afford. Second, as the
reception areas are primarily smaller urban centres
and more remote areas that have traditionally been
little affected by metropolitan influences, the arrival
of 'city folk' can administer a major social and
cultural jolt to the existing community, captured
well in Pahl's (1966) phrase
urbs in rure.
Third, unlike
the suburbs, which attract primarily younger
families, the counter-urbanisation process involves
a much greater proportion of older people,
including retirees, reinforcing the top-heavy age
structure already resulting from the departure of
young adults and in due course increasing the
burden on health care and social services. Many of
these areas are also affected by their attractiveness
for city-based second-home owners, removing
housing from the local market without any gain in
permanent residents. Despite the overall boost
given to the local economy, the outcome may well
be an acceleration in the outmigration of less well-
off local people, particularly where restrictions on
new building (for instance, in national parks and
other protected areas) focus the extra pressures on
the existing stock of housing.
Ideas for solutions abound, but as can be seen
from the case studies, they have so far proved to
have been of only limited effect. Given the deep-
rooted nature of the urban deconcentration
process, it is perhaps not surprising that the most
This vicious circle of decline has proved extremely
difficult to break. Certainly, the big-city
authorities appear unable to redress these problems
by themselves, because of lack of resources. As
noted by Eversley (1972), in an early analysis of
the inner-city problem in Britain, the fiscal
resources available to city governments shrink as
their wealthier residents and most rapidly
expanding businesses depart, while at the same
time their per
capita
needs for public sector services
increase because of their progressively rising
proportions of very poor households. The latter is
further aggravated if cities continue to act as
reception areas for low-income people arriving
from backward rural areas and other countries, as
has been very widely the case in Western Europe
and North America in recent decades (see
previous section).
At the same time, the process of receiving the
city exodus in the suburbs and beyond is not
without its difficulties, just as the process of
urbanisation has proved not totally beneficial to the
cities involved. As regards the suburbs, the problems
are principally those of congestion and costs. As the
development pressures build up, land becomes more
scarce, building tends to take place at higher
densities and newcomers get less housing for their
money than earlier suburbanites. The latter,
however, also face disadvantages in due course, as
they lose the green space and low local taxes that
helped to persuade them to move in the first place.
With further building, they find their homes further
from open land, and the taxes rise as the local
powers need extra funds to provide new schools,
roads, drains and community facilities, while road
congestion increases and makes the commute back
to the city-based job more stressful. Little wonder
