ABSTRACT
Celebrated in movies and music, home of Boeing and Microsoft, Seattle has been underwritten as the potential “shock city” of the twenty-first century, much as Manchester was hailed as the prototypical city of the industrial revolution or Los Angeles as the embodiment of the modern city. On postcards and television clips, Seattle’s symbolic being takes the form of a typical, albeit glittering, high-rise downtown flanked by the city’s landmark, the Space Needle, amidst an attractive waterfront and a spectacular snow-topped volcano, Mount Rainier. In reality, the city of Seattle proper is the lone flagship of a sprawling region consisting of four counties (King County dominates, though Snohomish and Pierce are rapidly developing to the north and south, and with Kitsap County to the west), two additional central cities (Tacoma and Everett), and some 70 incorporated suburban cities. Like most US central cities with roots in the nineteenth century, the city of Seattle has lost population since the 1950s, and today it houses less than one-fifth of the region’s population on one-tenth of its land. Further, Seattlelites, as they are called, differ greatly from their more conservative suburban counterparts, the former consistently clashing with the latter on issues such as the environment, transportation reform, equal rights for gays and lesbians, and gun control. Powerful industries such as Boeing have grown in many locations away from the city of Seattle. Bill Gates, the famed chairman of Microsoft, and himself a native Seattlelite, moved both company and family outside of the city limits. Seattle and Puget Sound from the air https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203857779/c4c0aed9-0e14-422a-be66-e785cb5830b5/content/fig10_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
