New York and Pittsburgh: Contrasts in Community

Abstract

This essay develops the theme of Chinitz's 1961 paper. To understand cities, Chinitz argued, urban economists must pay attention to the supply side, especially to economies and diseconomies of agglomeration, which result from the interaction of density, scale and heterogeneity. This paper, in contrast to Chinitz, emphasises the diseconomies, which become predominant as urban scale increases and account for many of the deep-seated social problems with which urban economics is concerned. The failure of urban models to incorporate agglomeration seriously limits their usefulness and is partially accountable for the decline of interest in urban economics. Throughout, recent histories of New York and Pittsburgh are used, as in Chinitz's paper, to illustrate the argument.