central city and close-in neighborhoods have come to be home to an increasingly affluent residential population and a high-end service economy. With the penetration of urban functions into the country side, the old distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural have collapsed.10
Pronouncements by authorities are one way to illustrate the need to redefine what “city” means in the early twenty-first century. Another emerges clearly from contrasting actual cities. Philadelphia and Los Angeles provide especially apt comparisons because they embody the old and the new urban America.
A Tale of Two Cities
In 1900, Philadelphia typified urban America.11 The ecology of America’s third-largest city was a classic example of the urban ecology codified by the Chicago School of sociologists—concentric zones based on class and economic function, dotted by pockets of ethnic and racial concentration, radiating out from a central city—or of Peirce’s “nucleated city.” With its diversified manufacturing base, Philadelphia was an industrial power-house. By 2000, Philadelphia had slipped from second- to fifth-largest American city, while Los Angeles had skyrocketed from thirty-sixth to second. At the start of the twenty-first century, Los Angeles defined American urbanization. In The Next Los Angeles, Robert Gottlieb and his colleagues observe, “To understand the future of America, one needs to understand Los Angeles. Nearly every trend that is currently transforming the United States . . . has appeared in some form in Los Angeles.”12 This new megalopolis was shaped by the automobile rather than the railroad, which, along with the streetcar, had done so much to define America’s industrial cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Los Angeles’s heterogeneous population—far more diverse than Philadelphia’s ever was—had arrived from around the globe as well as from all over America. Los Angeles’s sprawling, multicentered, multiethnic regional development stood in dramatic contrast to the old, single, dense core surrounded by residential zones and a suburban periphery, exemplified by the Philadelphia region. Even though service industries dominated its economy to an unprecedented degree, Los Angeles probably was America’s most important twentieth-century industrial city. At midcentury, its aerospace industry replaced Pennsylvania’s shipbuilders as the heart of the military-industrial complex, while factory jobs migrated from the Northeast and Midwest to the South, West, and overseas. Los Angeles emerged as a major center in the Pacific basin and an important player in the global economy. Philadelphia, on the other hand, could not surmount its place as a second-order city on the international stage.
The contrast between Philadelphia and Los Angeles reflected not only changes in the two cities over time but America’s divergent regional history. Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, and other Sunbelt cities more or less followed the Los Angeles model and grew rapidly. Old industrial cities, like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, lost manufacturing jobs and population.
Although Philadelphia did not begin to lose manufacturing jobs in the aggregate until after 1950, industrial restructuring had begun to undermine its older manufacturing sectors early in the twentieth century. Philadelphia’s mills started to shift to the non-union South in the 1920s, and shipbuilding, a huge industry early in the century, was a shadow of its former self in 1950. As a share of the workforce, employment in textiles dropped by nearly two-thirds between 1900 and 1940. The experience of the steel, machine tools, locomotive, steam engine, and railroad industries followed the same trajectory.
To some extent, new industries temporarily replaced the old ones. These included consumer-oriented manufacturing, such as auto assembly and food processing, as well as firms participating in the “second industrial revolution” of chemicals and electronics. The Philadelphia region also played an important role in the radio and early computer industries. But these newer industries lacked the local base of the older manufacturing firms. They were, instead, often branch plants of national or international corporations such as RCA and Westinghouse that pulled out of the region to chase cheaper land and labor in the South, Mexico, or Southeast Asia.
Philadelphia never successfully replaced its industrial economy. Service sector growth, while important, never catapulted the Delaware Valley into a competitive spot in the global economy, and its major service sector employers, like its midcentury manufacturers, are usually branch offices of corporations headquartered elsewhere. Public sector employment also became increasingly important. Employment by the federal government multiplied from 1.7 percent to 3.6 percent of the regional workforce between 1950 and 1970 before falling back to 1.9 percent as federal aid to cities declined. To some extent, employment in local government compensated for the federal withdrawal; its share of employment increased from 1.3 percent in 1980 to 1.9 percent in 2000. Where the Philadelphia region grew jobs was in education and health care. Employment in educational services jumped from 1.8 percent in 1950 to 7.9 percent in 2000. Jobs in hospitals multiplied from 1.4 percent of the regional workforce in 1940 to 4.2 percent in 2000. The Delaware Valley’s universities and medical schools, not its factories, had become its anchor institutions—major economic assets. Los Angeles followed a very different economic path in the twentieth century. As happened elsewhere in America, agriculture became less important. By the middle of the twentieth century, it accounted for only 1.2 percent of employment in the city. This straightforward decline, however, masks an important change that distinguished the Southwest from the Atlantic Coast: the rise and extent of migrant labor.13 Mexicans harvested fruits and vegetables; Japanese immigrants dominated the cultivation and trade in flowers. Los Angeles may have acquired the image of an entertainment and leisure paradise, but its reality was industrialization, which included food processing. In the 1920s, Los Angeles’s population more than doubled and then increased even more with the dust bowl migration of the 1930s and the great migration of African Americans in the decades following World War II. By 1935, Los Angeles had catapulted to fifth-largest manufacturing center in the United States. Its major industries included cinema, petroleum drilling and refining, and aircraft and automobile assembly. It was second in the manufacture of tires, and fourth in apparel and furniture. With the Cold War and wars in the Pacific—Korea to Vietnam—Los Angeles emerged at the apex of the military-industrial complex. From 1940 to 1970, as its population tripled to ten million, it led all other metropolitan areas in manufacturing growth. At its peak in 1980, aircraft production accounted for 3 percent of regional employment; with military cutbacks and outsourcing, that fraction had declined to 1.3 percent in 2000. According to one informed estimate, each defense sector job generated 1.5 to 2.5 jobs in other local sectors of the economy. Los Angeles’s manufacturing preeminence resulted not only from high-tech industries. A large local electronics sector consisted of assembly plants paying low wages to documented and undocumented Asian immigrant workers. Southeast Asians dominated electronics, while Latin Americans engaged in low-wage work for new sweatshops in the apparel industry, which elsewhere had largely fled the United States.
By the late twentieth century, however, services dominated Los Angeles’s economy. Banking, insurance, and various other business services became increasingly important, as they did in Philadelphia. Real estate, though, employed a larger fraction of the workforce than it did in Philadelphia, as did entertainment and recreation. Although employment in higher education and medicine also multiplied, Los Angeles—with its robust manufacturing and high-end services—did not depend on educational and health services as much as Philadelphia. Los Angeles also differed from Philadelphia in the role of public administration. In 2000, local public administration employed 1.9 percent of the region’s adults—roughly half the share in the Philadelphia area. In part, the lesser importance of public employment in Los Angeles reflected the city’s more buoyant private sector. In part, too, it grew out of differences in priorities, which resulted in more privatized police forces, garbage collection, and services for gated communities in greater Los Angeles than there were in the Delaware Valley.
Across the twentieth century, Philadelphia and Los Angeles differed dramatically in their ability to attract new residents. Between 1900 and 1940, no more than 26 percent of Los Angeles residents reported being born in California—most of the rest had arrived from the East, the Midwest, and Mexico. In 2000, only 45 percent were native Californians. Migration from elsewhere in the United States had slowed, but more than
