Difference Between Cities And Postindustrial American Cities

John Updike once wrote that, “ Cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”. This quote is very representative of American cities because it recognizes the fact that as time progresses the mechanisms that built up the city may no longer be blatantly evident, but the city lives on in an adapted form as time progresses. This notion of similarities and difference between aging cities can be seen when looking at both preindustrial and postindustrial American cities. Two prime examples of how these types of cities are similar come in the form of how they are meticulously planned out, and their concern with their economic stability. The major differences between
In the case of postindustrial cities, Thomas Sugrue suggests that there is an increasing concern and understanding that as the city moves further out of the industrial age the number of jobs and citizens will diminish. This fear is a fairly common within all cities because these numbers represent the cities ability to maintain itself in some sort of economic capacity. If the number of jobs and citizens were to diminish past a certain threshold it would cause an economic downturn for that city. Although this is not a new concept for any type of city, it is one that has adapted it’s form to match the current situations of the a postindustrial city. In the case of preindustrial cities the notion an economic downturn comes in the form of fear that a cities townsfolk would go to another colonial city and sell their goods there. In the context of a preindustrial city if there was an exceedingly high number of individuals selling their goods in other cities rather than their own it may hurt the economy. It would do this by causing an already limited economy to have fewer options than it already has. It may also have the ability to make the city seem less desirable to new immigrating groups because it would cause the home city to seem less profitable than its neighbors. This in turn would cause the city to not do as well. Keeping the concept of promoting a competitive economy in mind in the context of preindustrial and postindustrial cities there is a major fundamental difference between how the two economies are setup. This difference is what ultimately seems to shape the face of the cities that we now see in our postindustrial