NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW

New, Old, But Always Urban: “How Cities Won the West”

By Brian D’Ambrosio, 12-15-08

How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America
By Carl Abbott
University of New Mexico Press, 357 pages, $34.95

The view of the West as a vast expanse of untrammeled nature is an old and popular one, but it is also a mythic one. Urbanization in the region is nothing new. Cities conquered the American West long ago.

It’s a myth that Carl Abbott, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, takes on in his book How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America.

“In our popular understanding,” writes Abbott, “the West used to be a place of isolated individuals and small groups in scarcely formed communities – mountain men, prospectors, Oregon Trail families, and homesteaders living in very little houses on a very big prairie.”

Abbott challenges the view of the rugged frontier and replaces it with an image of a metropolitan West at the center of a changing region, then and now.

Cities rather than individual pioneers have been the driving force in the settlement and economic development of the western half of North America. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, western urban centers served as starting points for conquest and settlement. As these frontier cities matured into metropolitan centers, they grew from imitators of eastern culture and outposts of eastern capital into independent sources of economic, cultural, and intellectual change.

The same trends continue today, he argues, and the image of the idyllic, unspoiled American West is as out of place now as ever. In the 2000 census, eight of the nation’s 20 biggest cities were in the West. These super-cities – Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Seattle, Phoenix, San Diego and Denver – each had more than 2 million residents and together accounted for almost half the region’s population.

More than 80 percent of the people of California, Washington, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico lived in cities. So did more than 70 percent of those in Utah and Oregon. The total urban population of all 19 western states in 2000 was 77.9 million. That’s 28 percent of all Americans.

Western cities continue to gain ground. Eight of the 10 fastest-growing cities were in the West. Among cities with populations of at least 500,000, 13 of the 20 fastest-growing were here, topped by Las Vegas, with an astonishing 83 percent growth.

Abbott’s book covers smaller cities as well as large. It gives plenty of attention to Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, Denver, and Salt Lake City, but less prominent cities also get speaking parts in the story, including Missoula and Billings, Mont. So do Boise, Butte, Bismarck, Bakersfield, Brownsville, and Burnaby. 

The West has always been settled and developed outward from its gateway cities, Abbott argues. Denver was essential to Colorado’s growth, pouring in investment dollars to create railroads, smelters and refineries that processed the gold and silver ore that locomotives hauled out of the Rockies. Portland was the gateway to the great Columbia River valley of Oregon and Washington. In 1889, the city was poised for economic takeoff and explosive growth.

For others, the growth would come later. In the 1950s, Missoula, Mont., was a farm and forestry center with a small university. A half-century later, it was a center of environmental education and activism and a part of the “New West.”

Today, Abbot says, Western cities display the energy of their residents’ financial, economical and social keenness. Openness to economic opportunity has paralleled innovation in social design and intellectual gravity. Over the last two generations, he says, these Western cities have begun to nurture social and economic changes that have spun off in transformational directions, and many more are likely to come.

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