Book contents
- Front Matter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The conceptual framework
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The barriers to structural improvement
- 3 The barriers to infrastructural improvement
- 4 The barriers to spatial change
- Part II Three case studies
- Part III Conclusion
- Notes
- Sources of illustrations
- Index
2 - The barriers to structural improvement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Front Matter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgments
- Part I The conceptual framework
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The barriers to structural improvement
- 3 The barriers to infrastructural improvement
- 4 The barriers to spatial change
- Part II Three case studies
- Part III Conclusion
- Notes
- Sources of illustrations
- Index
Summary
A great many factors obstructed the improvement of structures in all of America's great cities in one way or another, from the beginning to the end of the period under study here. They slowed the process of adapting houses, stores, warehouses, factories, and other buildings to economic and population growth and, when improvements were finally, belatedly achieved, impeded further change. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, architects, civil engineers, businessmen, and public officials devised ways to make necessary adaptations easier to accomplish. They never, however, managed to overcome all of the barriers to structural improvement, for most defied easy technological or administrative manipulation.
This chapter examines the frictions that impeded this aspect of the process of environmental redevelopment. For the sake of conceptual clarity it focuses entirely on the problems of structural redevelopment, reserving analysis of the problems of infrastructural and spatial change for later chapters. Nevertheless, one important argument will be that none of the processes leading to the physical and spatial redevelopment of cities can be understood in isolation from the others. Building patterns; street patterns; sewerage, water, power, and mass transportation systems; and commercial and residential location patterns all existed in relationship to one another. This interrelationship fostered an equilibrium in the total land use pattern which functioned as an important barrier to environmental change, in and of itself. It will be returned to later.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Limits of PowerGreat Fires and the Process of City Growth in America, pp. 12 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986