The role of cities is changing in these times of increasing decentralization, globalization, and deformation of traditional constructs that are used to define cities. In some cases, technology is the driving force that has led to deconstruction of social, economic, and production interaction zones.
For example, improvements in transportation and transportation infrastructures made it easier for workers to commute to distant places outside of the city in order to find work. Eventually, people asked why they bothered to live in the city and fled for the suburbs that were closer to the decentralized new work sites.
Cheaper land outside of built up urban areas made it easier for manufacturing and other huge business concerns to move from built up urban areas and to use communications technology and the transportation infrastructure to tie themselves to far flung interests.
Cities came to support concentrations of the well to do, the daily transient workers and customers, and the very poor. The middle classes fled for the suburbs and agglomerations that formed around centralized urban cores. Left behind where regional shopping, economic, finance, cultural, transport, government, jurisprudence, major medical, culture, major university and other hubs. The very poor found the internal byways and sidewalk level “highways” of the city amenable to getting around on foot and subsisting on the friendlier and more efficient delivery of services that cities provide the poor.
As a result, where citizens had to travel to the city in order to conduct county level business, see a lawyer, deal with property ownership issues, register to vote, see a full operatic production, start a business, or shop at major department stores, these things can be done at decentralized service centers that service the suburban populations. Even local suburban junior colleges put on cultural events with impressive performing groups.
The city as core of necessary activity is deconstructing, and the city is no longer seen as the only place of opportunity for work. That leaves tourism, major legal and government activity, shopping, dining, entertainment, and work in the major economic, government, medical, and other institutions that remain there.
As a result, the population in a city can change by hundreds of thousands in the course of a day! As workers and others come in and interact to the city during business hours, the population is at it’s peak. And the city’s population is completely different than it will be when the workers flood out of the city to their homes in suburban areas.
This means that the needs, actions, behavior, costs, and income from the flowing and ebbing daily population are vastly different than those of the residents. In San Francisco, California, during the 1970s, this was called “The Manhattanization of San Francisco”, and was the source of much controversy.
It will be interesting to see if technolgy allows enough more people to work from home to impact the ebb and flow of workers to and from the cities and to cause changes in the daily population of cities.
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