ABSTRACT
The 55 cities included in this chapter are from two countries, the United States and Canada. There are three important developments that have shaped the North American urban system since the 1970s. These developments include:
In the early 1970s, de-industrialization and a shift of manufacturing to mainly low-cost developing countries started a new decentralization pattern in the United States (Castells, 1989; Sassen, 2001). Many remaining industries left the decaying centres of the old manufacturing belt and relocated in the Sunbelt states that offered more desirable conditions including new high-tech plants, tax breaks and less unionized labour, resulting in a process known as ‘the Sunbelt expansion’. As a result of this, employment in the United States has shifted to cities and suburbs of the south and southwest (Rice and Bernard, 1983; Clark and Roche, 1984; Macionis and Parrillo, 2004). Besides manufacturing, these cities have also become important service centres. The result is that 22 of the 55 cities included in this chapter are from the Sunbelt states. In manufacturing belt cities, much of what is left of the old industry moved out to suburban locations (Castells, 1989) resulting in a severe decline in central cities of the former manufacturing belt. On the other hand, due to their historic importance as strategic locations, cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia remained as important economic centres and international hubs for service industries (Mohl, 1997). The result is that 16 of the 55 cities analysed in this chapter are from the former manufacturing belt states of the United States.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 between the United States, Canada and Mexico, had a transforming impact on the economies of Northern American cities as well as their interrelations both with each other and with cities in different parts of the world. Various cities of the United States, Canada and Mexico have become more integrated with increased trade activity and some cities have experienced decline (Bourne and Simmons, 2003). Cities close to borders have benefited more from NAFTA than cities in the periphery. In Canada, Toronto has changed from a national trading centre to a prominent world city, linking the Canadian economy with the global economy (Newman and Thornley, 2005). East and West coast cities became gateways to the NAFTA region, reinforcing the status of such cities as Los Angeles and Miami as immigration hubs (Newman and Thornley, 2005).
Current debates among European and American scholars highlight the importance of ‘trans-metropolitan’ urban areas as integration zones for the global economy (Faludi, 2002; Taylor and Lang, 2005; Lang and Dhavale, 2005; Hall and Pain, 2006; Lang and Nelson, 2007). In the United States, trans-metropolitan areas are referred to as megapolitans, large urban regions with physically interconnected metropolitan and micropolitan areas through transportation networks, constituting a functionally interdependent urban network (Lang and Dhavale, 2005). Megapolitans specialize in service sector and high-tech employment (Lang and Dhavale, 2005; Lang and Nelson, 2007). The largest and the most important metropolitan areas of the United States are located in megapolitans, which contain 67 per cent of the total population (Lang and Nelson, 2007). By 2050, it is expected that megapolitans will have more than half of the US population growth and two-thirds of its economic growth (Carbonell and Yaro, 2005). In the Canadian urban system, there are only six metropolitan areas with populations exceeding 1 million: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton (Charney, 2003). Around 48 per cent of the population lives in these six metropolitan areas, reflecting a huge centralization of population and employment. In Canada, as in the United States, debates related to new regionalism (Sancton, 2001) and growing metropolitan area populations led to the consolidation of continuous urbanized areas into five greater metropolitan areas: ‘greater Toronto, greater Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Vancouver-Victoria and the central Alberta urban corridor’ (Bourne and Simmons, 2003, p28). The continuous region from Quebec City to Windsor, which includes the greater metropolitan areas of Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, is part of a bi-national ‘mega-region’ identified by Florida (2008). The megaregion concept is similar to that of megapolitans and both concepts provide an important framework in understanding the dynamics of the global connectivity of Northern American cities. The result for our analysis is that 39 of the 55 cities in this chapter belong to trans-metropolitan urban regions.
