Planning a City’s Future

The purpose here is to focus interest on what seem to be the most pertinent questions relating to the economic aspects of human resources in the contemporary American urban setting. The conventional concept of resources relating to the production of goods and services can, by extension, be applied to people as members of the labor force. It is less conventional, but increasingly important, to consider human resources as consuming households.

First, the location of production activities is usually placed near its markets. Thus, the study of the location of industry, and in these terms labor resources, must take account of the facts of consumption—the nature and location of effective demand. Second, as the means of private transportation have proliferated, if not exactly improved, individual workers' decisions regarding residential location have come more and more to involve consumption questions. That is, they live where the housing, schooling, recreational, and some other household consumption factors are best suited to their needs. Just as the growth of cities once represented essentially the relocation of rural labor, so recently the mass decisions to migrate to suburbs reflect decisions taken principally as consumers.

Residential location has been viewed traditionally as a junction of proximity to job opportunities and ease of transportation. In the past, this was generally true. However, the growing importance of the consumption factors in choosing one's homesite is modifying the traditional rationale of urban locations principally as production centers. Consequently, the simple association of human resources and job opportunities, although still useful for some analytical purposes, appears to be growing less so. Instead, increasing emphasis will have to be put on urban centers as places to attract consuming households both in the sense of encouraging the development of the appropriate skills needed for future industry, and in the sense that the community will be able to hold its best workers because it is a pleasant place for them to live.

The urban setting, as we conceive it, is the site of services provided to households in order that most of them can contribute to the labor force. The quality of their services directly affects the quality of the labor outputs. There is good reason to believe that the community, rather than the single household, to an increasing extent has the determining voice in specifying the skills and attitudes which particularly affect the quality of the labor force. Education has long been largely the problem of the community. Health and recreational facilities are becoming increasingly the community's responsibility. Welfare services to the poor, the handicapped, and to the aged are also each decade becoming more and more social rather than happenstance individual household responsibilities, not only because minimum standards, themselves, are being raised, but also because as a result of improved medical knowledge each decade sees the old becoming a larger share of the population.

Thus, three generations ago, it might have been adequate for virtually all analytical purposes to conceive of the city as a huge manufacturing environment into which were fed raw materials, machines, labor, and entrepreneurial talent. True, cities at that time did provide many services, but because so much of the labor was unskilled and because households consumed relatively so little in the way of either public goods or services, the quantity and quality of public inputs into the household could largely be ignored except by a few socially conscious reformers.

Now, I suggest the city must be conceived differently. Besides being the site of the manufacturing of goods and salable market services, it has become the conscious molder of men, not only in general terms of their social values (which social economists have long understood), but also in terms of their physical and intellectual competence to participate in traditional industrial activities. Once, rebellious or unteachable students could look forward to earning their own living as unskilled manual laborers. Now, so direct a "solution" seems increasingly less feasible. If it cannot teach them in their youth, the community bears the burden of their dependency in the years when they should be most productive. For these reasons I urge the inclusion of household consumption factors in the discussion of human resources, even though this may be somewhat of an innovation.