Frontiers and Sections: Cities and Regions in American Growth

CITIES ARE OBVIOUS ENOUGH, WE USUALLY KNOW ONE WHEN WE SEE IT: a vertical accent of skyscrapers, smokestacks, and grain elevators rising out of the horizontal landscape of North America. Regions are harder to find. They are abstractions defined by common heritage and by intermittent flows of people, objects, and information. They can be large or small, physiographic, economic, or political. Regional boundaries vary with the purpose of the discussion and the perspectives of its participants. One of the most effective strategies for making sense of the jumble of overlapping regions that constitute the United States is to relate regional development and definition to the growth of cities and city systems. Recent work by historians and geographers shows that cities have been senior partners in the regionalization process. City people and urban institutions have spearheaded successive frontiers, organized production, centralized rural resources, linked local economic systems to their national or international counterparts, channeled flows of information, and provided focal points for regional culture and identity. Analysis starts with the geographer's distinction between nodal and uniform regions. Nodal regions are defined by the active connection of their parts to a center or focus. Most commonly they are urban regions created by complementary relationships between a city and the surrounding territory. ' Movements between city and hinterland include the easily measured tangibles of raw materials, finished goods and people; well documented flows of economic information such as