CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
From rather humble beginnings, the development of cities has produced a complex settlement pattern that is changing the face of the Earth and the way humans use and occupy it. A city’s spatial organization reflects the culture that built it whether that culture is traditional or advanced. The common denominators of all cities are growth and change. While it is doubtful that the urbanization experiences of the industrialized Western countries can, or even should be duplicated, in much of the world there is no doubt that urbanization is the next step in human cultural evolution.
Geographers have recognized that the relationships between cities and the surrounding countryside can be measured and mapped, Every city and town has an adjacent region within which its influence is dominant. Farmers in that region sell many of their products on the city’s markets, and customers from smaller towns and villages come to the city to shop and to conduct other business. The city’s dominance can be seen in many other areas of life as well, such as the surrounding trade zone or hinterland, the surrounding region from which people travel into the city for work, business, or pleasure. In general, large cities tend to lie farther apart than smaller ones; towns lie still closer together, and villages are separated by even shorter distances. Investigating the above patterns ultimately leads to the study of the anatomy of the city itself; its internal structure and functions.
Interurban Spatial Organization
The Industrial Revolution occurred almost a century later in the United States than in Europe. When it finally did cross the Atlantic in the 1870s, it progressed so robustly that only 50 years later America surpassed Europe as the world's mightiest industrial power.
The impact of industrial urbanization was felt at two levels. At the national level, there quickly emerged a network of cities specialized in the collection, processing, and distribution of raw materials and manufactured goods, and linked together by an even more efficient web of transport routes. The whole process unfolded so quickly that planning was impossible. Almost literally, near the turn of the twentieth century America awoke to discover that it had built a number of large cities.
In the United States, the urban system evolved through five stages of development determined by prevailing modes of transport and industry. Today’s period of high technology, still in the process of transforming the modern city, dates from the 1970s.
Urban Functions
Every urban center has an economic base, with some workers employed in basic (that is, goods-producing) sectors that satisfy demand in the hinterland or markets even farther away. These activities produce goods for export and generate an inflow of money. On the other hand, workers who maintain city streets, clerks who work in offices, and teachers who teach in city schools are responsible for the functions of the city itself. This is the nonbasic (also called the service) sector. Some people who work in a city, of course, do some of each. A mechanic may serve customers from a village in the city’s hinterland, where there are no repair facilities, while also serving city residents.
This employment structure—the number of people employed in various basic and nonbasic jobs— reveals the primary functions a city performs. You should note that all cities have multiple functions, and the larger the city, the larger the number of functions. Some cities, however, are dominated by one particular activity. This functional specialization was a characteristic of European cities even before the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution gave it new meaning. This was once true in America as well, as Figure 23-1 reveals, but the situation revealed in these three maps no longer exists, at least to the extent shown on the maps. As urban centers grow, they tend to lose their specialization.
Central Places
The notion of a hierarchy of urban places, discussed earlier, identifies urban settlements ranging from hamlets to metropolises and is based not only on population but also on functions and services. These functions and services attract customers from both the urban areas and areas beyond the urban limits Thus every urban center has a certain economic reach that can be used as a measure of its centrality—the strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities.
In 1933, Walter Christaller laid the groundwork for central place theory. Christaller attempted to develop a model that would show how and where central places in the urban hierarchy (hamlets, villages, towns, and cities) would be functionally distributed, based on their respective provision of central goods and services—goods and services that a central place makes available to its consumers in a surrounding region—as opposed to those universally available. While not totally applicable in the real world, central place theory helps to explain why, under ideal circumstances, small urban places such as villages lie closer together while larger cities lie far apart (see text Figure 23-3).
Urban Structure
Cities are not simply random collections of buildings and people. They exhibit functional structure: they are spatially organized to perform their functions as places of commerce, production, education, and much more. Throughout the past century urban geographers have attempted to construct models that would account for the geographic layout of cities (see Focus on: Three Classic Models of Urban Structure). The task grew more complicated as manufacturing cities became modern cities and modern cities became postmodern. Today urban geographers identify superregions that they call urban realms, and they create models that show cities within cities (text Figure 23-5).
Models of urban structure reveal how the forces that shape the internal layout of cities have changed, transforming the single-center city with one dominant downtown into the polycentric metropolis with several commercial nodes.
CHAPTER QUIZ
MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. The area surrounding a village or town that depends on that urban place for services is called the:
a. boondocks
b. hinterland
c. support region
d. rural area
2. The Industrial Revolution crossed the Atlantic to America during the:
a. 1850s
b. 1860s
c. 1870s
d. 1880s
3. The iron Horse Epoch of the evolution of the American urban system was dominated by the
diffusion of the:
a. steel industry
b. automobile
c. steam boat
d. steam-powered railroad
4. The rank-size rule of urban places does not apply in countries with;
a. dominant primate cities
b. very long coast lines
c. mainly urban populations
d. Interstate Highway Systems
5, The central place theory of the urban hierarchy was developed by:
a. Carl Sauer
b. Walter Christaller
c. Homer Hoyt
d. Alfred Weber
6. In North America, the core of the city is called the:
a. central city
b. suburb
c. CBD
d. functional structure
7. In metropolitan Los Angeles how many discrete urban realms have emerged around the central
city.
a. eight
b. seven
c. six
d. five
8. A number of large cities had been built in America by the turn of which century.
a. twentieth
b. nineteenth
c. eighteenth
d. seventeenth
9. New York became the primate city of America by:
a. 1750
b. 1850
c. 1900
d. 1950
10. In the 1940s, retail centers in America were concentrated in which of the following regions.
a. the Northeast
b. the South
c. the Great Plains
d. the West Coast
TRUE/FALSE QUESTIONS
1. One factor in the United States’ ability to surge ahead of Britain in the Industrial Revolution was the immigration of millions European workers. (TF)
2. City planning was started e4rly in the United States because of rapid growth. (TF)
3. Workers in manufacturing plants work in the nonbasic sector. (TF)
4. In a city, the number of nonbasic workers is never greater than the number of basic workers. (TF)
5. Today, functional specialization is no longer a major factor in American cities. (TF)
6. Christaller’s central place theory was never proven to fit any place in the world. (TF)
7. The three classic models of urban structure, although quite different from each other, are used to explain the layout of post modern cities in different parts of the world. (TF)
8. In American cities most people live and work in the suburban city. (TF)
9. Studying cityscapes is useful in finding clues to how societies develop. (TF)
10. To study the urban morphology is to study the urban environment as a living organism because the city changes all the time. (TF)
STUDY QUESTIONS
I. Identify and define each stage of John Borchert’s four-stage model of urban development. What stage has been proposed for the present? How is this stage affecting the United States?
2. Explain the rank-size rule. Where doesn’t this rule apply?
3. Explain the difference between basic and nonbasic sectors. Give examples of jobs in each and their role in the urban environment.
4. When we talk about the primary functions of an urban place today, why is functional specialization no longer so important? Look at Figure 23-1 and compare it with what the text says about changes that have occurred since specialization was important.
5. What was Christaller’s main contribution to geography?
