Boom, Bust, and Renewal

The growth and demise of urban areas throughout American history

2000s

For nearly all of the United States' history, the nation's population has grown at a rapid rate. However, this population growth has not been distributed evenly, neither temporally nor quantitatively. The territorial expansion of the country, coupled with developments in technology, pushed the American frontier ever further west throughout the 19th century, giving rise to boom towns that diminished the concentration of population once found in the northeastern corner of the nation. This phenomenon exacerbated in the 20th century, when the Deep South became a second frontier. Concurrently, a general trend toward urbanization since the Industrial Revolution has increased the share of Americans living in large or very large cities, sometimes at the expense of small cities. The manner in which these trends, along with local and regional economic influences, interact are yours to explore in this map.

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Data Sources
Core-based statistical areas (metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas)

United States Census Bureau (2010). 2010 TIGER/Line® Shapefiles: Core Based Statistical Areas - Metropolitan/Micropolitan Statistical Area. Retrieved from https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/CBSA/2010/tl_2010_us_cbsa10.zip

Counties

United States Census Bureau (2010). 2010 TIGER/Line® Shapefiles: Counties (and equivalent). Retrieved from https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/COUNTY/2010/tl_2010_us_county10.zip

Population, 1790 to 1990

United States Census Bureau (1996). Population of Counties, Earliest Census to 1990. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/Population_PartIII.txt

United States Census Bureau (1996). Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790 - 1990. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/PopulationofStatesandCountiesoftheUnitedStates1790-1990.pdf

Population, 2000 and 2010

United States Census Bureau (2012). Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2012/dec/c2010sr-01.html

United States Census Bureau (2012). Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010 - Chapter 1 Data. Retrieved from https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/c2010sr-01/cbsa-report-chapter-1-data.xlsx

Methodology

Population data per county were acquired in plain-text, tab-delimited format. To make these data geospatial in nature and prepare them for analysis, a Python script was written to parse the text file and output a suitably-formatted result to a comma-separated values (CSV) file. The utilized Python source code is available at this project's GitHub repository.

In ArcGIS Pro, said CSV file was joined to TIGER/Line county features. The resulting features, with populations from 1790 to 1990 now present, were spatially joined to core-based statistical area (CBSA) features. The layout of the 2000/2010 CBSA population spreadsheet was configured to allow for import into ArcGIS Pro, then these figures were joined to the CBSA features.

The CBSA polygon features, with all years of population now joined, were converted to points to eliminate unneeded data for proportional symbol symbolization. The result was exported to a GeoJSON file.

This web application reads said GeoJSON file via AJAX and stores the received data in an object, waiting to add it to the map when requested. After a request for display is made, the vintages of data in question are read from the object and a sort of histogram is built to determine what size the point symbol for each CBSA should be. The minimum and maximum sizes allowed vary based on the map's zoom level, and only those population figures in the first to 99th percentiles are used to create the histogram to prevent outliers from adversely affecting the symbolization.

Limitations

The most-populated parts of Alaska are administratively organized into county-like divisions termed "boroughs". The majority of the state, however, remains unorganized. To facilitate a census throughout the state, even in unorganized territory, the US Census Bureau has created divisions named "census areas". These census areas form the basis of the core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) that are symbolized in this map. These census areas have only been in use since the 1960 Census, however, meaning that data from before this time are not readily relatable to modern-day CBSAs. As a result, pre-1960 population data for Alaskan locales are not provided in this map.