American Exceptionalism and the Emergence of E–Urbanization
Brian J.L. Berry
The University of Texas at Dallas

This essay takes as its departure the concept of "American exceptionalism" as recently revived by Seymore Martin Lipset, and applies its central tenets to the notion of "e-Urbanization," the reshaping of settlement patterns as a consequence of the Information Technology (IT) revolution.

According to Lipset, the United States is the most anti-statist, legalistic and rights-oriented nation in the world. These traits are the outgrowth of the principles of liberty, individualism, egalitarianism, populism and laissez-faire that were embedded in the nation’s founding principles. But this American Creed also had a dark side, promoting not only personal responsibility, independent initiative and voluntarism, but also self-serving behavior, atomism, and disregard for the common good.

The expression of both faces of the American Creed in the dispersed urbanization of the automobile era is well known. Indeed, successive waves of technological change, mediated through the underlying cultural predispositions of the Creed, have brought successive types of cities to the American scene. In what ways will the new IT technologies, similarly mediated, call forth new settlement types and patterns?

The concept of e-Urbanization is introduced to capture the shifts that are unfolding. Just as Louis Wirth argued that the structuring dimensions of the industrial city were size, density and heterogeneity, so the dimensions of e-Scale, e-Density and e-Heterogeneity are introduced as the structuring dimensions of the e-City. e-Scale involves the span of IT networks, e-Density the intensity of networked interdependence and the existence of positive feedback, and e-Heterogeneity the tension between the globalization of tertiary interactions and the persistence of primary ethological needs for self-identity via status identification and territoriality. Together, they define the principal axes along which the e-City will evolve and e-Urbanization will pattern global space.

Brian J.L. Berry is Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his B.Sc. (Economics) degree at University College, London in 1955, the M.A. in geography from the University of Washington in 1956 and the Ph.D. in 1958. He was a faculty member at the University of Chicago (1958-1976), at Harvard (1976-1981), and a dean at Carnegie-Mellon (1981-1986), joining UTD in 1986. In the 1960s his urban and regional research sparked geography's "quantitative revolution" and made him the most-cited geographer for more than 25 years. Subsequently, his inquiries extended from urban ecology to geographic information systems, from growth center theory to the concept of counterurbanization, and, most recently, have focussed on long-wave macroeconomic/historical processes. The author of more than 450 books and articles, he has attempted to bridge theory and practice via involvement in urban and regional development activities in both advanced and developing countries. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, is a fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1988. In 1999 he became the first geographer to serve as a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.