Analytical 1: Background Analysis

One large part of Urbanization can be desrcibed as the number of people move in and out of the cities (A.K.A. urban growth), as well as why they might have moved between more rural areas and larger cities. A big issue with this specific part of urbanization is the excessive amount of people moving into the cities, which causes the cities to become either overpopulated or “large and in charge.” The 1700s and 1800s proved to be a time of more beneficial growth, because America was evolving constantly to get to where it is today. A place like New York City started off as a small town somewhere around time just before the American Revolution, then became a larger city because many Americans wanted to live in this growing city. This kind of situation is beneficial for both the city and maybe even the country, because it allowed people to gain more jobs and make money off of more people. These cities would later get much attention around the world if they became very successful in having attractions to give Americans a reason to move there. Towns are able to grow out because of the population growth. In fact Chicago was considered a town when it was first built sometime during the early/mid-1800s, but as it grew (dispite the Great Chicago Fire), it has become America's 3rd largest city. Frederick Law Olmsted, was a writer and an architech in New York City around the late 1800s, and wrote about the time between the 1860s and 1910 in his book/essay called "The Unplanned Growth of Cities." He stated, "Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of the park should be the other." He was saying that the beauty of the architecture in many residential buildings was starting to be taken away because of more people moving into New York City at the time, and the only way to keep the artisitic architecture alive was by creating parks. The significance of this book was that it discussed how the growth of cities can become very unstable. He was right, in quite a few ways, because there were larger scale fires that broke out because houses may have needed to be closer together to fit more people into the cities, and a number of epidemics broke out by the neighborhoods in places like New York City. Urban overpopulation can indeed become a large issue, but most people in America wouldn't notice an issue like this unless it was thrown in their faces. If overpopulation became a crisis, there would be far more homeless people than any American (or human for that matter) can imagine. A city that is too overpopulated can become a problem, and so suburbs and more rural areas are developed to spread out the population. However, when people general build suburbs farther away from these cities, there can be problems even with that, such as more money being spent on a highway system that can smoothly link those far-away suburbs to the bigger, overpopulated cities.