areas have higher rates of poverty than do urban areas, and rural Americans are
more likely than city dwellers to use food stamps—despite the relative proximity to
farms (National Rural Health Association, 2006). Rural areas in the United States
also have increasingly higher suicide rates than cities—with all their urban alienation
(National Association for Rural Mental Health, 2007).
Yet the scale and speed of migration from the countryside to cities has slowed in
rich countries like the United States and in the European Union compared with poor
and developing ones, especially in Asia and Africa. The United Nations reports that
today’s global urban population of 3.2 billion will rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030,
when three out of five people worldwide will live in cities. (U.N. World Urbanization
Prospects, 2005). This surge of migrants will generally come into urban environments
whose minimal infrastructure, squalid slums, and air and water pollution already
make them fundamentally difficult and dangerous places to live and work. Already
over 90 percent of the urban population of Ethiopia and Uganda, two of the world’s
most rural countries, live in slums, as do nearly 60 percent of city dwellers in South
Asia and 30 percent in Latin America. The city of Delhi draws 75 percent of its drink-
ing water from the Yamuna River, into which untreated city sewage is dumped, right
along with farm and industrial waste (Economist, 2007).
Suburbs
Before the twentieth century, members of the upper classes always had at least two
houses, one in the city and the other in the country, for weekend and summer visits
(one of the most popular magazines for the upper class is entitled Town and Country).
Everyone else had to live a mile or two at most from where they worked (don’t believe
the stories your grandparents tell about walking 20 miles to work and back, in
three feet of snow, uphill in both directions). Once Henry Ford’s mass production
made automobiles affordable, people could live much farther from work, as much as
five or ten miles, and, once limited-access highways grew up, 20 or more miles. What’s
more, the rapid migration of large numbers of Blacks from the rural South to north-
ern cities in the decades after the Civil War, especially to cities that were home to
expanding industries like automobiles and steel, led to racial fears of crime and
violence. The White middle classes began moving out of the cities altogether, into out-
lying areas called suburbs,where their houses were separate from the others, with
front and back yards, just like upper-class estates, instead of the cramped apartments
and townhouses of the cities. The expression “a man’s home is his castle” arose dur-
ing this period (Jackson, 1987). And the natural boundaries (rivers and
the like) were the moats that were to protect these miniestates from the
now-dangerous cities.
The first mass-produced suburb, Levittown, opened in an unincor-
porated area on Long Island in 1951. By the time it was finished in1958,
there were 17,311 houses, plus shopping areas, churches, and recreation
centers.
Suburbia has also received its share of detractors. Folksinger Malvina
Reynolds complained that the suburbs were made of “Little Boxes,” that
were “all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same,” not only
the houses but the people: identical families, White, middle-class, hetero-
sexual, husband, wife, 2.5 kids. Many comedies of the 1950s begin with
long lines of cars driven by identically dressed wives, who drop identically
dressed husbands off at the train station for their identical commutes into
the city. Suburbs were criticized as deadening, soul destroying, isolated.
They stifled creativity. They created a generation of robots—of “men in gray
THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT 633The world’s first suburb was probably
Brooklyn, New York, founded as a village in
1834 just across the river from Manhattan,
an easy commute by ferry, yet set in a
rustic, rural environment. By 1860, this
suburb had been incorporated into a city,
and in 1898, Brooklyn voted to become a
borough of New York. Today Brooklyn is the
fourth most populous “city” in the United
States, with 2.5 million residents (Jackson,
1987; Snyder-Grenier, 2004).Didyouknow