LUTHER GULICK 123 



greatly exceed that in a solidly built-up city. The suburban drain on 

 certain of these resources, per capita, is terrific.^ 



Building materials also show a markedly different use pattern. In 

 the rural areas wood predominates as a building material; in the 

 urban areas, more and more, the materials used are iron, steel, 

 cement, copper, aluminum, tin, glass, bricks, ceramics, stone, and 

 plastics. In other words, urban populations, though they have fewer 

 and smaller rooms per family, use more nonrenewable construction 

 resources than do the nonurbanites, with their much greater use of 

 wood.^" 



This is accentuated by the increasing demand for fireproof con- 

 struction in the cities, and by the location there of a preponderant 

 share of the massive governmental, terminal, educational, adminis- 

 trative, cultural, entertainment, religious and other typically "city" 

 edifices. 



While no one has endeavored to translate these factors into natu- 

 ral resource terms, we must not overlook the fact that, during these 

 years of rapid urbanization, this dramatic movement to the cities and 

 the suburbs will of itself considerably step up the drain on those re- 

 sources which go to build and to service city populations as con- 

 trasted with rural populations. 



Here I want to develop further the point I noted earlier, that we 

 cannot prove fully, or balance out satisfactorily and finally, the scale 

 factors involved in urbanization. As it stands now, urban popula- 

 tions have, as I have indicated, more education, higher incomes, 

 lower comparable savings, and greater personal consumption of 

 manufactured commodities. The income figures used are adjusted 

 for educational differences, the savings figures for income levels, and 

 the effort has been made in cost-of-living figures to adjust for family 

 patterns. But, we may well ask, what happens if and when the dif- 

 ferences in education, families, and incomes disappear, as is the ob- 

 jective of many social measures? Might we not then find that the 

 economies of scale equal or exceed the costs of scale, so that dense 



9 Walter Isard and Robert E. Coughlin, Municipal Costs and Revenues Re- 

 sulting from Community Growth (Wellesley, Mass.: Chandler-Davis, 1957). 



^"J. Frederic Dewhurst and Associates, America's Needs and Resources 

 (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1947), Chap. 8. 



