Columbus, Ohio

Columbus, the capital of the Buckeye State, is Ohio's largest city and the 15thlargest municipality in the country. It was founded in 1812 by the General Assembly of the state as its third capital (Chillicothe was the first), but, as noted by Charles C. Cole in 2001, it has remained one of the least chronicled of the country's major metropolitan areas. This is remarkable since Columbus is the large and dynamic capital of one of the country's most important industrial states. It is readily accessible, and the presence of major eastwest and northsouth interstate highways and the I-270 beltway around the city have spurred the development of an expanding warehouse and distribution industry. Moreover, the geography of its location has changed through time because of technological changes, first in transportation and more recently in communications. One consequence of the communication revolution has been the reorganization of the urban economy into a dynamic service economy with international dimensions, not simply one dependent on Ohio and the Midwest.

In recent years, the city government's annexation policy has led to the growth and expansion of the city, and this has made Columbus a more powerful political force within the state at the expense of Cleveland and Cincinnati. This policy has its roots in the outward movement to the lower density suburban areas of the region by manufacturing; commercial business, especially retail trade; and the residential population following World War II. In the 1950s, Columbus was less than 50 square miles in land area and still had room to grow in all directions. It had a relatively few small suburbs. Much of the county (Franklin) was made up of unincorporated agricultural lands in several townships.

During the administration of Mayor Maynard D. “Jack” Sensenbrenner in the 1950s, however, Columbus embarked on an ambitious program of territorial annexation. At the heart of the program was the issue of how to capture for the city some of the growth in industry, business, and residential population that was taking place, especially in the unincorporated areas beyond the city's political jurisdiction. Sensenbrenner sought through the annexation process to avoid many of the problems confronting America's cities, such as the loss of urban residents, businesses, industries, and their tax bases as a result of frozen political boundaries that were the reflection of the existing annexation law. The experiences of Cleveland and Cincinnati, cities that in the 1950s were already hemmed in by smaller political units and had no opportunities for expansion, were familiar to the mayor, encouraging the aggressive annexation movement in Columbus.

As a result, the annexation policy not only served to expand the area base of political Columbus (now more than 200 square miles) but resulted in a dynamic city, no longer dominated by a single large urban core but one with a series of nuclei, each providing most of the services and functions of the core at accessible points on and within the regional transportation system. It was in many ways a visionary policy that has reaped tremendous benefits for the city.

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