Developing Frontier Cities: Lessons from the Cities of the Prairie Program

Abstract

The United States is the frontier society par excellence. Elsewhere I have written of the frontier chain reaction set off by the American land frontier and continuing until the present (Elazar, 1966:Chs. 4–5). One consequence of that has been the difficulty in maintaining communities. Today there is a widespread revival of discussion of the need to rebuild local community and restore a sense of civic responsibility and citizenship to counteract the radical individualism, much of it generated by the postwar metropolitan frontier and its successors, which has so disrupted traditional patterns of American life over the past 30 years or more. Thoughtful Americans of all persuasions agree on the importance of this need (Etzioni, 1994; Matthews, 1994; Sandel, 1996). The thesis of this article is that it only can be met in communities of a certain character and of appropriate scale. Increasingly, however, both problems are compounded by the problems of metropolitanism; that is to say, the development of communities or potential communities check-by-jowl for both qualitative and quantitative reasons. Qualitatively, people seek advantages of scale by living in large aggregations of population, while quantitatively, the increase in human population density requires them to do so. Developing appropriate communities must take place within that context.