Importance of the Central City Cityscape 125 The Importance of the Central City to the Regional and National Economy: A Review of the Arguments and Empirical Evidence

In the postwar period, population and employment have been growing rapidly in suburban areas, whereas in most central cities they have been declining or growing slowly. Fifty-seven percent of metropolitan statistical area (MSA) residents and 70 percent of MSA jobs were located in central cities in 1950. Today central cities contain only about 37 per-cent of MSA residents and 45 percent of MSA jobs (Mieszkowski and Mills, 1993). The rapid suburbanization of jobs and people and, in particular, the maturation of “edge cities ” (Garreau, 1994) have led to a debate, which started in the popular press and spread to the academic community, over the importance of the central city to the regiona