Describe Early City Life

Describe early city life. How did people live? What were the issues? How was the city planned over time? Early life in the urban cities of the US were a whole other world compared to what the cities are today. In the early 1800s, the US population in urbanized areas were about 300,000, with a total population peaking roughly at 5 million. By 1900 the population had spiked to about 30 million with 40 percent of it citizens living in urbanized areas. This spike in population had a lot to do with immigrants and a baby boom that together surpassed the amount of deaths. Transportation in New York for example, began as horse drawn carriages with about 20-30 pounds of manure, counted as pollution, per horse daily. Eventually the city evolved to cable cars, and then automobile were being released to the public and so transportation as whole began to boom and develop, making the streets that were already previously crowded with people now crowded with cars, along with street cars. Population was such a problem that people had to live on top of each other. The buildings were tall and narrow, and as many as 100 people had to live in one building. As many as 20 …show more content…
Throughout the article they are strongly against the idea of compact cities being implemented throughout the country, while even stating that we are not running out of space while we slowly, but clearly are. Agricultural land, density preferences, energy glut, the scope for transit, suburbanization and congestion, the efficiency of compactness, technology and agglomeration-congestion trade-offs, etc, were just some of the main topics touched upon within the article. All topics made very interesting points, some harder to argue against, but just about each one had a counter