ABSTRACT
Our transition from rural to metropolitan has been rapid. The surroundings in which metropolitan people live vary considerably, ranging from inner city to open country. Metropolitan population growth is a basic feature of the social and economic transformation of the United States—the transition from an agrarian, to an industrial, and to a service-oriented economy. Continuing dispersal and expansion means that the density of the central cities and of the great metropolitan areas as a whole is falling slightly as the border gets pushed further and further outward. The territorial expansion of metropolitan areas has resulted from the movement of business and the more affluent and White population out of the central city, and from a shift in the locus of new growth—residential, industrial, commercial—to the expanding periphery. Natural increase is the primary factor affecting the growth of metropolitan population as a whole.
