(for) Fundamentals of the Human Mosaic / by Terry Jordan-Bychkov et al.
Keywords: see textbook, p. 323 [Jordan et al. 2010]
City shapes are shaped in large part by desires, desire to live close to work, away from noise, near some services, and away from others. The concentric ring model is based on desires to live close to work and downtown shopping. The central business district (CBD) is surrounded by a transitional zone, and then a ring of mostly apartments, then a ring dominated by single family dwellings, then more expensive housing on larger landholdings. Sometimes the transitional zone turns into a ghetto, and other times, it is absent (ex. renovation).
In a sector model, main streets attract retail and repel nice housing. Likewise, railroads attract industries and services that rely on them, and repel nice housing. The CBD is still there, but it is surrounded by wedges of development, with richer housing expanding out from the center away from major roads with retail, and away from railroads and other businesses. Poorer housing is closer to these wedges of service and manufacturing.
Later, multiple nuclei of attraction formed further out, including malls, parks, airports, and other services. These attract businesses that serve them and their customers, and repel housing when they are not desirable. For example, nice housing is found in San Jose in the rose garden district, but not near the airport.
Some people want to live further out, and the peripheral model captures the results of people wishing to live in smaller settlements in the periphery. These are connected to the core and to each other for service provision and access to work, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Milpitas, Campbell, and other cities illustrate these behaviors and the city patterns that result. Each of these models reflect different types of centralizing and decentralizing forces.
San Jose is a mixture of all four city models in action, based on individual home purchaser desires business owner desires. City planners trying to make a quality urban area for the citizens of the city. All of these actors continue to shape the evolving cities we live in. Some are more complex, when agglomeration of services or activities pull some people to some regions, or push them away to others. This can produce uneven development on a city or inter-city scale, based largely on interlinked sets of socioeconomic factors.
Within these broad patterns, neighborhoods and cities vary, in terms of social culture regions, most commonly by income in San Jose. (Compare Saratoga and East San Jose, for example.) We see further differentiation into ethnic cultural regions, (e.g. Little Tokyo, Little Saigon, Hispanic neighborhood districts in San Jose). Age comes into play with concentrations near critical or often used services. Some cities, e.g. Jerusalem, have districts for different religions. The book also mentions education as a social cultural region identifier, and others likely exist. Much of the information used to study these regions comes from census tract data. Some effort is also spent tracking homelessness, and the squatter settlements some homeless people make.
To avoid undesirable activities in the core, some people live in peripheral cities, and use lateral commuting to travel from home to work and back. Some people use restrictive covenants to constrain activities, construction results, or ethnicities. (The last one is illegal here.) Some lending institutions avoided loaning to some poor or ethnic minority places (e.g. redlining), but this is also illegal now.
City planners repeatedly try to increase the overall quality of life of their citizens. Sometimes, they try to block or reduce checkerboard development, which is expensive and wasteful, by encouraging in-filling of urban areas. In other places, cities may support gentrification or urban renewal projects. Ethnic minorities with more cash may independently develop suburban ethnic neighborhoods, ethnoburbs over time. All of these patterns are variations within the overall city structure, which is often described using city models, (described above).
The remnants of historical patterns exist today in layered palimpsests. Some of these have symbolic meanings to their residents. This is more likely in the cores of megalopolises, but less so in some of the newer edge cities, (peripheral model). Peripheral city office parks and high-tech corridors are more modern inventions to satisfy common manufacturing and service industry needs. Like many newer master-planned communities that are developed today, redevelopment projects for older communities may also have festival settings, some of which try to use their local palimpsests for flavor, or may instead refer back to cultural and historical patterns.
Reference: Jordan-Bychkov, Terry J., Mona Domosh, Roderick P. Neumann, Patricia L. Price. 2010. Fundamentals of the Human Mosaic. W. H. Freeman and Company. 357 pages.