Production System Dynamics and Metropolitan Development

. This paper offers an analysis of the complex interrelationships between metropolitan development in the United States and the logic and dynamics of the system of economic production. The argument begins with a brief historical review of U.S. metropolitan growth and change since the end of the last century. Following this is a discussion of the recent reversal in the broad pattern of metropolitan expansion over the past several decades. The resulting dispersal of productive activity to suburban and nonmetropolitan areas has now become one of the dominant processes shaping the contemporary economic landscape. This process of dispersal is explained in terms of a theory of capital deepening, restructuring, and reorganization of productive activities. Accompanying this dispersal, a new spatial division of labor of considerable geographical significance has emerged. The paper concludes with a restatement of the developmental logic of the U.S. metropolitan system as a predicament-laden outcome of the logic of labor-process transformations in capitalism.