116 The City's Challenge in Resource Use 



As anyone can see for himself, urban settlement is no longer 

 closely confined within "city limits." Around each growing urban 

 complex, residential, industrial, and commercial settlement spreads 

 out in a loose pattern of urban sprawl and ribbon development. 



These urban concentrations are not distributed evenly every 100 

 miles across the face of the continent. They tend to cluster in great 

 splotches and streaks. The largest reaches for 600 miles from Massa- 

 chusetts to Virginia and contains now over 29 million people. An- 

 other is developing, running west from Connecticut, New York, and 

 Pennsylvania across the continent to the Mississippi River, the so- 

 called "industrial belt." The Pacific Coast shows another urbaniza- 

 tion from San Francisco, with some temporary gaps, to the Mexican 

 border. And other smaller urban clusters are beginning to emerge. 



Each of these massed urbanized regions is characterized by the 

 same general pattern of settlement. Population is spread out, as are 

 industries, shopping facilities, even businesses, educational institu- 

 tions, and entertainment and other common facilities. 



And, what is equally important, these regions are filled up with 

 urbanized people. They have higher incomes, more education, more 

 sophisticated tastes, spend more, work hard but have more leisure 

 time, change jobs easily, are more footloose, and take to other 

 changes in their stride. These urbanites are more cosmopolitan and 

 tolerant, but just the same they want to live and bring up their 

 families with people of what they consider their "own kind." So new 

 urban and suburban mores are arising, founded on our old values, 

 but designed to fit the new life. 



The whole thing is held together by the private automobile, the 

 thruways, mass transportation, the telephone, other common chan- 

 nels of communication, and the unbelievable crisscross of economic 

 and social intercourse. 



And there are other bonds of community, including dependence 

 on common resources and governmental structures which I want to 

 discuss later. 



The resulting pattern of settlement — industrial, commercial, and 

 residential — is something new under the sun. It is not just more of 

 the old. It is a new system of land use and human organization. 



