THE EMERGING NEW METROPOLIS—
MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL CASE1
John R. Borchert University of Minnesota
The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolis is the regional center of financial
management and information diffusion for an extensive area of the Midwest
and Great Plains. Since the time of European colonization the settlement
pattern has been evolving. A new region and a new metropolis have been
emerging from the old. This has been especially true in the automotive era.
The first map shows the traditionally subdivided area of the metropolis
and identifies three different zones (Figure 1). The darkest shade marks
the areas around the historic central areas which were fully built-up before
the auto era. The next lighter shade marks the additional area built up by 1964; and the lightest gray tone shows the zone that will contain the new
contiguous subdivision to 1985. Planned unit developments are mainly in
New Growth Zones; one lies in Zone of Redevelopment.
Since 1920, in the auto era, the contiguous built-up area has grown
from about 200 to 700 square miles. Meanwhile, the population of the SMSA has increased from 3/4 million to 1.8 million. But much more has happened
to the size and shape of the metropolis.
Beyond the edge of the traditional zone of urban expansion lies a
'Paper presented at session on Geography and Public Policy, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, April 1972. Parenthetical numbers refer to maps. -2-
vast zone of metropolitan assimilation. The assimilation zone has urban-
ized as a result of sharply increased interaction both internally and with
the zone of traditional expansion which it surrounds. The area has
urbanized largely through the transformation of its rural population, and
not by an invasion of suburbanites moving outward from the central cities.
If one includes the zone of assimilation, the population of the metropolis
has grown in the auto era from 750 thousand to 2.7 million. The area
has expanded from 200 square miles to 15,000 square miles. The area
encompassed by this expanded circulation system would not be built up, at
recent rates of expansion and suburban densities, within the next thousand
years.
Numerous measures of the extent of the zone of assimilation are
available. (2) The second map shows how the potential accessibility to
the total population of the region has changed in the past four decades.
Within that regional system the potential accessibility value that enclosed
the two central cities in 1920 now encloses all, or the most populous parts,
of 33 counties in eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
These latent changes in accessibility have been realized to a large
extent during the past two decades. (2a) The traffic density which charac-
terlzed state highways in the periphery of the traditional urbanized area
in 1950 is now exceeded throughout almost all of the zone of assimilation.
The outer limit of daily work trips into the SMSA approximates the area of
expanded potential accessibility.
Throughout this zone, rural townships and municipalities of all sizes have gained population for two decades. (2b) Young people are remaining and making homes. Small towns, farmsteads, and new houses clustered in wooded or lakeshore sites function as dormitory suburbs. -3-
Approximately the same region has had a distinctive kind of intensification
of its agriculture. (3) Farmland productivity per acre is among the highest
in the Upper Midwest, despite wide-spread soil and terrain disadvantages.
Yet the proportion of part-time farmers has increased to well above the
Minnesota average. Tractor headlights pierce the darkness of an early
spring evening as a commuting farmer puts in his crop of soybeans; or a
young dairy farmer does the milking after returning from a day's work at a
factory bench, office desk, or grease rack.
Home offices of major corporations are dispersed widely through the
zone of assimilation. (4) These tend to be home-grown industries or
financial institutions based historically on accessibility to the regional market and resources of labor, management and financing. They are no farther
in travel time from the Twin Cities air terminal than Westchester and
Fairfield counties are from Kennedy Airport in New York. Branch plants
are concentrated mainly in the zone of assimilation, although the import-
ance of the farm machinery market tends to pull the pattern toward the rich agricultural area to the southwest. And a copious supply of under-
employed farm labor tends to stretch the pattern toward the northwest. (5)
All of the branch plants and home offices comprise an interacting network extending over both the expansion and assimilation zones and reaching the highest intensity within the circumferential freeway.
Thus the Twin Cities urban field, defined by the permanent residential and work locations of its population, includes not only the traditional zone of urban expansion but also a much more extensive zone of assimilation. (6)
In addition, however, a part-time zone of urban expansion extends far out across the lake regions of Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. The next map indicates the extent of development of lakeshore leisure and retirement -4-
homes largely for permanent residents of the Twin Cities and surrounding
zone of assimilation. These are suburban residences for families during the
summer months, during increasingly extended periods of winter, and year-
around or seasonally in retirement. A dozen of these homes means as much in
added basic income to the local community as a new industrial job. And
there are more than 60 thousand such homes.
The largest, highest quality, most accessible lake districts have
become extended part-time cities with familiar management problems associated
with changing and increasing settlement. (7)
Thus the residential urban field of Minneapolis-St. Paul can be con-
ceived in two main parts: the permanent residential field, which includes
not only the zone of traditional urban expansion, but also the zone of
urban assimilation; and the intermittent residential field, which is a
part-time extension of the permanent field.
Most of the metropolis is a very low-density system, but is highly
interactive internally and closely connected with other regions and nodes
in the national economy.
Furthermore, at its outer edges it overlaps other sets of urban
clusters, which cover more remote parts of the metropolitan region. These
clusters constitute a family of low-order, low-density metropolitan systems,
each with 200 to 250 thousand inhabitants.
Each cluster has a travel time diameter similar to that of the Twin
Cities SMSA. Like the Twin Cities, it contains major diversified centers;
small, partly-specialized neighborhood centers; specialized regional
centers for health, higher education, industry, state offices and services, newspaper publication and broadcasting. It has a multiplicity of residen- tial areas—old, new, rich, poor, mixed, compact, scattered, close-in to -5-
major centers, outlying in small towns and along lakeshores. There is a
road net which connects each of those interacting zones with all others.
Each of the major diversified centers has a substantial element of indepen- dence from all others; yet there is also much interdependence—travel in every direction throughout the cluster for business, shopping, work, health care, education, and social or recreational purposes. These clusters will provide a framework for multi-county planning and develop- ment, beyond the Twin Cities permanent residential field, under a 1969 act of the legislature.
Within the permanent residential field of the Twin Cities, growing social interaction is producing further transformations. Steam threshing shows and old-time dance halls in the zone of assimilation generate metro- politan-wide followings. The symphony circulates throughout the zone of assimilation to offer concerts in high school auditoriums. Non-whites are diffusing their residential locations throughout the metropolitan field as they become increasingly a part of the circulation and information system.
Interaction is encouraged further by a toll-free telephone region which now covers an area extensive enough to embrace the combined SMSAs of Baltimore and Washington and intervening territory.
The present metropolis is for all practical purposes a new city.
Most of it has been built in the automotive era, in fact, nearly half since
1946. By 1985 at least one-third and perhaps 40 percent of its dwelling units will have been built since 1970. The urban clusters further out in the rural areas of the state are also new cities in the sense that they are emerging multi-centered, interacting systems. Within their regions they embrace all of the management problems of older cities—waste management, deteriorating old districts, open-space preservation, locating and servicing -6-
new developments. In addition, they provide opportunities for organization
of local government and finance along wholly new lines and clear needs for
new technologies of transportation, utilities, and waste handling. Indeed
the entire region is, in a sense, a collection of experimental cities.
On the face of it, furthermore, this appears to be a fairly good case
of successful regional development.
The economy and culture of an extensive part of the nation have been
organized around a major center. The major center is large enough and
dynamic enough to have attributes to satisfy a wide variety of tastes—
from Jane Jacobs to Ebenezer Howard to Frank Lloyd Wright, conformists,
libertarians, urbanites, and frontiersmen. Personal income per household
in the SMSA has risen above that of most American metropolitan areas. The metropolis, including the zone of assimilation, provides 50 to 70 million
dollars annually to subsidize local governments in other parts of Minnesota
to improve services and hold down local taxes. A region of only 5 and one- half million total population is able to maintain an effective center in
the international economy and culture.
In addition, the regional spatial organization has always included a set of smaller growth centers.
The size and number of growth centers have tended to shift in response
to changes in technology and values. Response to change has been facilitated by relatively high standards of performance measured by such traditional
social indicators as literacy, family stability, and expenditures for
education, libraries, physical and mental health, corrections, or welfare.
Furthermore, one can test the spatial patterns for their conformity with
popular models of nodality, distance-decay, hierarchy, diffusion, major
centers, and radial corridors; and he will find that the spatial behavior -7-
of the region s people is producing respectable correlation coefficients.
There is a nice compromise of efficiency and equity.
Yet, beneath this surface runs great and continuous turmoil. Lack of
common and current locational information on the part of developers,
agencies, and the general public results in irrelevant conflict or needless
hardship. Lack of a geographical concept of their relative position in
the region, the nation, and the world contributes to many people's opposi-
tion to continuing or improving the very measures which have produced
success—increasing social interaction and diffusion, relatively high
standards of public outlay for social purposes, reorganization of public
agencies to meet new problems. And lack of maintenance of many public and
private facilities and grounds perpetually detracts from the anticipated
effects of efforts to order and adjust, to build and to rebuild.
These problems suggest that some traditional needs for geography in
regional development are still with us: (1) to monitor, describe, and
project the changing settlement geography of the region, and to reach
other professional and technical people with the results of our work;
(2) to reach the wider public with more and better geographic education;
and (3) to improve the meaning and use of our map legends. By the latter,
I mean to better understand human perception of the landscape and thus to bridge the gap between an understanding of abstract spatial patterns and an understanding of how the country actually looks. Despite great efforts
in both geography and regional planning, and visible absolute progress along many lines in the Upper Midwest region, these needs continue, relatively at
least, to be as great as they were ten years ago.