Abstract
This study reconsiders the political conditions behind the geographically extensive pattern of urbanization in the United States by focusing on a rapidly urbanizing county on the northeast fringe of the Denver metropolitan area. Unusual for Colorado but typical of the industrialized northeast where this pattern first emerged, Weld County has a high concentration of small towns, the primary repository of statutory authority and ideological legitimacy to convert agricultural land to urban use. The urbanization of Weld County in the 1990s was amplified by the expansion of the towns into their surrounding farmland, which flooded the market with newly urbanized land. The study goes on to consider the prospects of this distinctively American political form in the wake of the property tax revolts of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the structural changes in the American economy during the past 30 years.
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