ABSTRACT
The spatial destinies of cities are set by millions of individual decisions made over long periods of times. This chapter deals with the contemporary landscape of the United States and the ways people have built upon it. Urban sociologists and geographers, initially convinced that a single pattern of urban form could be determined, have more recently come to conclude that metropolitan forms are multiple and vary with local forces and choices in the city's development process. The classic work on the form of US cities and suburbs was done by sociologist Ernest Burgess, who described in a chapter in the influential text, The City, a circular zone theory of urban spatial form. When other urbanists sought to apply the Burgess zonal model to their own cities, different patterns of urban form sometimes provided a closer fit.
