Postwar trends in metropolitan employment growth: decentralization and deconcentration

A key finding to emerge from this study is that the widely studied suburbanization or decentralization of employment and population is only part of the story of postwar urban evolution. Another important part of the story is a postwar trend of relatively faster growth of jobs and people in the smaller and less-dense MSAs (deconcentration). The authors find that postwar growth in employment (and to a lesser extent population) has favored metropolitan areas with smaller levels of employment (population) density. These trends are shared by major regions of the country and by manufacturing and non-manufacturing employment. The fact that employment growth has favored MSAs with smaller levels of employment (or lower levels of employment density) indicates that economic processes favoring convergent (as opposed to parallel) metropolitan growth played an important role in the postwar era.