In recent years many people have been disturbed at urban growth and its encroachment upon agricultural land. Some seem to have regarded the city as a sinister thing, reaching out to strangle and engulf the rural area and its people.
Hasn't much of this been exaggerated? In our view, it is not city growth, as such, that creates the problem, but population growth. Had the population growth of the last twenty or fifty years taken place in open country the area required for site purposes would have been far larger. If it is use of land we are concerned about, the city is far more efficient than the open country: the larger the city, the less land is required for a given population increase.
An agricultural revolution has taken place in the United States in the past forty years or so. If the total population today were 100 million, as it was at the end of the First World War, the area in crops would be less by at least 100 million acres. The growth of cities over the past generation has kept infinitely more land in agricultural production than it has taken out of it.
It seems probable that the area within cities and other urbanized areas will rise from about 16 1/2 million acres in 1950 to between 30 million and 41 million acres in 1980, and between 41 million and 57 million acres by the year 2000. But it also seems probable, on the basis of present experience, that at least one-third of the land within city and urbanized area boundaries will be idle, though effectively withdrawn from purposes other than urban: from agriculture, forestry, and recreational uses, for instance. An unknown amount of land outside of urban boundaries also will be withdrawn.
It would be physically possible to accommodate most of the increase in urban land use on land now withdrawn from other uses and provide for much-needed recreation space into the bargain; but the process will take much greater public responsibility and imagination than we have had in the past. If we really wish to minimize the impact of the city upon the countryside, let us start with the most lavish land users among the cities—the smaller cities and towns. It is the smaller urban places that take up most of the land used withdrawn by the cities, and their land-use problems have almost no planning or policy attention.
Adapted from Land for the Future, a new RFF study.
A version of this article appeared in print in the June 1960 issue of Resources magazine.
