TH E landscapes of any American city reflect countless decisions and actions from the time of settlement to the present. The results are apparent not only in differences in land use but in the kaleidoscopic variety of building facades, street patterns, and lot sizes. Early actions precluded or frustrated many later locational decisions. The metropolitan physical plant has accumulated through various historical epochs, and clearly those epochs were distinguished from one another by different ideas and technologies. Increasingly, in proportion to its size and age, the metropolis is becoming a complicated puzzle of heterogeneous and anachronistic features.
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John R. Borchert (1967) studied this question.