Urban Geography
Chapter 9
Key Question:
When and Why did People Start
Living in Cities?
Foundations and Terms of
Urbanization
• City – a conglomeration of people and buildings
clustered together to serve as a center of politics,
culture, and economics… modern cites are the
centers of Urban Functions:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Centers of Political Power
Higher education
Technological innovation
Modern Culture
Great Markets
Specialization
Classifications of Cities
• Urban hierarchy: ranking of settlements
according to their size and economic
functions, types of central place functions.
• -Hamlet: lowest level of settlements (often
not urban); offers few if any services.
• -Village: clustered human settlement larger
than a hamlet and generally offering several
services.
Classifications of Cities
• -Town: clustered human settlement larger than a
village; may range from a few to thousands of
inhabitants (even hundreds of thousands);
generally many goods and services are available.
• -City: clustered conglomeration of people and
buildings together serving as a center of politics,
culture, and economics; a town may have
outskirts, but virtually all cities have suburbs
(hinterlands).(5,000 0r 10,000 minimums)
• -Metropolis: usually contains several urbanized
areas and suburbs that act together as a coherent
economic whole.
Urban:
The buildup of the central city and the suburban realm – the city and
the surrounding environs connected to the city.
Around the world people are moving from rural areas to urban areas…
#1 migration flow in the World; recently % of urban pop exceeded
% of rural pop for first time in human history; appx 50% in each
globally
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift:
is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of rural
migration and even suburban concentration into cities,
particularly the very largest ones. The United Nations
projected that half of the world's population would live in
urban areas at the end of 2008; occurring most rapidly in
poorer, LDCs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/world/06/urbanisation/html/urbanisation.stm
Three Questions from these maps:
1. How has the world’s urban population changed in
the last 50+ years?
2. Where does urban growth appear to be growing the
fastest?
3. What might we be unable to see about urban
population growth in these maps?
Shenzhen, China
The Modern Process of
Urbanization –a rural area can
become urbanized quite quickly in
the modern world.
Success of modern urban centers
depends on their external
locational attributes; their relative
location with reference to non-local
places; distance from other urban
centers; relatively easy access to
other places
Shenzhen has grown form 20,000
to 3.1 million in three decades!!!
Shenzhen, China
Shenzhen changed from a fishing village to a major metropolitan area in just
25 years. 25 years ago, all of this land was duck ponds and rice paddies.
London and Shanghai have invested billions into their newly developed
industrial zones.
The First Urban Revolution:
Where? When? Why? How?
Agricultural Villages
• Before urbanization, people often clustered in
agricultural villages –
a relatively small, egalitarian village, where most
of the population was involved in agriculture.
About 10,000 years ago, people began living in
agricultural villages
WHY? What allows the first civilizations to emerge?
The First Urban Revolution
Where, how, and why did early cities form?
Early Cites form due to:
1. agricultural surplus
2. Specialization
3. social stratification/Social Structure
(a leadership class)
Six Hearths of Urbanization
In each of these hearths, an agricultural surplus and social stratification created
the conditions necessary for cities to form and be maintained.
Indus River Valley
Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were
two of the first cities of the Indus
River Valley.
- intricately planned
- houses equal in size
- no palaces
- no monuments
Huang He and Wei River Valleys
The Chinese purposefully
planned their cities.
- centered on a
vertical structure
- inner wall built
around center
- temples and
palaces for the
leadership class
Terracotta Warriors guarding the tomb of the Chinese Emperor Qin Xi Huang
Mesoamerica
Mayan and Aztec Civilizations
Many ancient cities were theocratic centers where rulers were
deemed to have divine authority and were god-kings.
Mesoamerica
Between 300 and
900 CE, Altun Ha,
Belize served as a
thriving trade and
distribution center
for the Caribbean
merchant canoe
traffic.
Diffusion of Urbanization
The Greek Cities
by 500 BCE, Greeks were highly urbanized.
– Network of more than 500 cities and towns
– On the mainland and on islands
– Each city had an acropolis and an agora
Athens, Greece
the agora
the acropolis
Diffusion of Urbanization
The Roman Cities
a system of cities and small towns, linked
together with hundreds of miles of roads and
sea routes.
– Sites of Roman cities were typically for trade
– A Roman city’s Forum combined the acropolis and
agora into one space.
– Roman cities had extreme wealth and extreme
poverty (between 1/3 and 2/3s of empire’s
population was enslaved)
Diffusion of Urbanization
Roman Roads: All Roads Lead to Rome.
Roman Empire
The Roman Forum
Aqueducts in Nimes, France
Hydraulic Civilization: Rome
thrived due to supply of
water
During the mercantile era, the cities that thrived were embellished by
wealthy merchant families, who built ornate mansions, patronized the
arts, participated in city governments, and supported the reconstruction
of city centers.
Genoa,
Italy
Before colonization, cities were centered
around a religious core.
Colonial cities were characterized by wider
streets and a lower population density.
Most cities located on rivers or seacoast.
World cities play key roles in organizing space
beyond their own national boundaries.
The Second Urban Revolution
The Second Urban Revolution
A large scale movement of people to cities to work
in manufacturing. Made possible by:
1. second agricultural revolution that improved
food production and created a larger surplus
2. industrialization, which encouraged growth of
cities near industrial resources
Where?? What?? When?? Why?? Consequences??
Industrialized regions of Europe, 1914
During the second half of the
20th century…
Nature of manufacturing
changed and locations changed,
too. Many factories have been
abandoned, creating “rust belts”
out of once-thriving industrial
districts.
Duisburg, Germany
Archaeologists have found that the houses in Indus River
cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, were a
uniform size: each house had access to a sewer system,
and palaces were absent from the cultural landscape.
Derive a theory as to why these conditions were present
in these cities that had both a leadership class and a
surplus of agricultural goods.
Key Question:
Where are Cities
Located and Why?
Site and Situation--locational factor that affects
the development of cities and towns
Site
* absolute location
of
a city
* a city’s static location,
often chosen for
trade, defense, or
religion.
Situation
* relative location of a
city
* a city’s place in the
region and the
world around it.
Rank-Size Rule:
in a model urban hierarchy, the population of the city or
town will be inversely proportional to its rank in the
hierarchy.
For example:
largest city = 12 million
2nd largest = 6 million
3rd largest = 4 million
4th largest = 3 million
Trade area
Trade area – an adjacent region
within which a city’s influence is
dominant.
Green Country, Oklahoma
Primate City
The leading city of a country. The city is
disproportionately larger than the rest of the
cities in the country.
For example: London, UK
Mexico City, Mexico
Paris, France
- the rank-size rule does not work for a
country with a primate city
Gateway City-- a city that serves as a link between
one country or region and others because of its
physical situation. (i.e. Istanbul, Miami, Casablanca)
Central Place Theory
Walter Christaller developed a model to predict how and where
central places in the urban hierarchy (hamlets, villages, towns,
and cities) would be functionally and spatially distributed.
Based on a city’s Trade Area (Define this)
Assumed: surface is flat with no physical barriers
places of the same size are equally spaced
no areas of overlap; largest central places will supply all the goods and
services the customers in that area demand and can afford
soil fertility is the same everywhere
population and purchasing power are evenly distributed
region has uniform transportation network
from any given place, a good or service could be sold in all directions out to a
certain distance; goods offered in smaller central places will be less
specialized than those in the larger areas
A settlement's functions as well as its economic reach produce a measure of its
centrality
Hexagonal Hinterlands
URBAN HIERARCHY:
C = city
T = town
V = village
H = hamlet
Economic Reach of a City
*Trade
Area: trade area defines where
customers live and how far they are likely to
travel to a particular business or business
district
* Threshold and Range:
• Range of sale (breaking point): maximum distance people will
travel for a good or service, central place function (economic
reach).
• -Threshold: the minimum number of customers needed to keep
the business running; minimum market size needed to support a
central place function
Gravity Model
• Uses size of location and
distance as factors for travel
• Size of location takes
precedent over distance
• The gravity model can be
used to estimate:
• Traffic Flows
• Migration between two areas
• The number of people likely
to use one central place
Population 1 x Population 2
Distance squared
Gravity Model
• The gravity model, as social
scientists refer to the
modified law of gravitation,
takes into account the
population size of two
places and their distance.
Since larger places attract
people, ideas, and
commodities more than
smaller places and places
closer together have a
greater attraction, the
gravity model incorporates
these two features.
• The relative strength of a
bond between two places is
determined by multiplying
the population of city A by
the population of city B and
then dividing the product by
the distance between the
two cities squared.
• Population 1 x Population 2
Distance squared
Urban Land Use
*Bid-rent Theory a geographical economic theory that refers to
how the price and demand for real estate changes as the distance
from the Central Business District (CBD) increases. It states that
different land users will compete with one another for land close
to the city center. This is based upon the idea that retail
establishments wish to maximize their profitability, so they are
much more willing to pay more money for land close to the CBD
and less for land further away from this area. This theory is based
upon the reasoning that the more accessible an area (i.e., the
greater the concentration of customers), the more profitable.
Agglomeration:In the study of human settlements, an urban
agglomeration is an extended city or town area comprising the
built-up area of a central place (usually a municipality) and any
suburbs linked by continuous urban area
Deglomeration
• The high cost of a downtown location now outweighs the
advantages of locating near other like industries. Publishing
companies have begun to move from New York to as far away
as Florida and Texas.
• Areal units--A challenge that occurs during the spatial analysis
of aggregated data in which the results differ when the same
analysis is applied to the same data, but different aggregation
schemes are used. In the US and Canada, the census tract is
the areal unit that best approximates a city neighborhood in
size. The idea of a metropolitan statistical area came from the
US Census Bureau
Urban Land Use
Sketch a map of your city or town and the
cities or towns nearby. Make a list of goods
and services available in each of these
towns. Do the ideas about central places
presented in this section of the chapter
apply to your region?
Key Question:
How are Cities Organized, and
How do they Function?
Urban
Morphology
The layout of a city, its
physical form an
structure.
Berlin, Germany
With wall (above)
And without wall (right)
What does the urban
morphology of the city tell
us about the city?
Functional
Zonation (aka
Specialization)
The division of the city
into certain regions
(zones) for certain
purposes (functions).
Cairo, Egypt
Central city (above)
Housing projects (right)
What does the functional
zonation of the city tell us
about the city?
Zones of the City
• Central business district (CBD)
• Central City (the CBD + older housing zones)
• Suburb (outlying, functionally uniform zone outside of the
central city)
– Now more than 50% of Americans Live in Cities
– Geographer Louis Wirth studied and created patterns for
suburban areas
– Dev of suburbs in the US most affected by popularity of
autos; cities in the western US have more pop in the
suburbs as compared to cities in the eastern US
– market area is an example of functional region
Modeling the North American City
• Concentric zone model (Ernest Burgess)
• Sector model (Homer Hoyt)
• Multiple Nuclei Model
(Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman)
Three Classical Models of Urban Structure
Modeling the North American City
• Concentric zone model (Ernest Burgess)
– 1920’s Chicago (CBD called The Loop)
– CBD is the focus of the city's social, commercial,
and civic life
– Zones grow is circle over time
– As city spreads Zones develop
– Land near center most valuable (bid-rent)
– suggests that the farther a neighborhood is from
the central business district, the greater its wealth
is
Modeling the North American City
• Sector model (Homer Hoyt) (1930’s) based on
Chicago, like concentric zone model
– Grow out in pie Shape
– Sectors grow along interstates, rivers etc.
– Focus on residential patterns
– urban growth conforms to sectors radiating out
from the downtown along such transportation
routes as bus and train lines
Modeling the North American City
• Multiple Nuclei Model (Chauncy Harris and
Edward Ullman) 1940’s
– CBD is losing its dominance as the single
nucleus of a city
– Neighborhoods develop their own markets and
function almost as independent cities
– Universities surrounded by pizza restaurants,
fast-food restaurants, and coffee shops.
– Most of the urban areas of the United States
follow the MNM
– MNM most likely associated with edge cities
Urban Realms Model
1970 & 1980’s
Each realm is a separate
economic, social and
political entity that is
linked together to form
a larger metro
framework.
“urban realm” came into
use to describe the
spatial components of
a metropolis during the
1990s
Suburban downtowns, often located
near key freeway intersections, often
with:
- office complexes
- shopping centers
- hotels
- restaurants
- entertainment facilities
- sports complexes
one major difference between suburban
areas in the US and Europe-- US
suburban areas enjoy relatively low
crime rates and good schools,
European suburban areas have more
crime and poorer schools than in the
cities.
European central business districts
(CBDs) are different from those of
most world cities have narrow streets
and low-rise buildings in the CBD.
Edge Cities
Modeling the Cities of the Global Periphery and
Semiperiphery
• Latin American City (Griffin-Ford model)
• African City (de Blij model)
• Southeast Asian City (McGee model)
Latin
American
City
(GriffinFord
model)
Latin American Cities
•Latin America is very urban, 80% with sparsely populated
hinterlands (land behind the city)
• Rapidly urbanizing
• Thriving CBD (traditional and traditional market)
• High rise sector
• Commercial Spine
• Disamenity Sectors
Disamenity sector – very poorest parts of the city
eg. the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
squatter settlements: housing for
poor migrants that contains very
few services
The African City
(de Blij model)
African Cities
•Africa is least urban region in the world and most rapidly
urbanizing (Under 40% urban)
• Imprint of European colonies visible in African Cities
• Have Prominent urban centers
• Can have 3 CBD’s: European, Informal, and Formal
•The Islamic city has best captured the idea of
globalism with modern skyscrapers and trade
advantages is Dubai.
Southeast
Asian City
(McGee
model)
SE Asian Cities
•Many of the world’s most populous cities in SE Asia
• Rapidly urbanizing
• Focal point is the old port (colonial)
• No Formal CBD’s
• Western Commercial Zone and Chinese merchant
zones
•Promoted economic growth through Western
investment and trade
Cities in Communist Europe
•Communist cities are marked by:
•Microdistricts: Small parts of cities that include housing,
industry, business and schools…limiting the need for
travel
Cities in Communist Europe
•Communist cities are marked by:
•Multi story concrete apartment buildings
•Microdistricts, with a huge dominant square at the
center of a city and wide, radiating avenues fronted by
ugly apartment blocks, are best seen in Bucharest,
Romania
Employing the concepts defined in this section of
the chapter, draw a model of the city with which
you are most familiar. Label each section of the
city accordingly. After reading through the
models described in this section, determine
which model best corresponds to the model you
drew and hypothesize why it is so.
Key Question:
How do People Make Cities?
New Urbanism
• Development, urban revitalization, and suburban
reforms that create walkable neighborhoods with a
diversity of housing and jobs.
• Benefits of suburban living: less crime and drug use,
parking space and a yard, opportunity of home
ownership, better schools.
– some are concerned over privatization of public spaces
– some are concerned that they do nothing to break down
the social conditions that create social ills of the cities
– some believe they work against urban sprawl
– Stores, workplaces, and services not within walking
distance
Making Cities in the Global Core
• Gentrification – individuals buy up and
rehabilitate houses, raising the housing value in
the neighborhood and changing the
neighborhood. Biggest downside is property
taxes are increased, forcing people out of their
homes.
• Commercialization – city governments transform
a central city to attract residents and tourists. The
newly commercialized downtowns often are a
stark contrast to the rest of the central city.
Spaces of Consumption
The transformation of the city into an entertainment district, where major
corporations encourage the consumption of their goods and services.
For example:
Berlin, Germany
New York City
FESTIVAL LANDSCAPE
A landscape of cultural festivities. Festival landscapes are designed in
urban planning to be a site for concerts and festivals as well as focal
points for informal human interactions. Examples of festival landscapes
include the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, the Skydome in Toronto and the
Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Central Park in New York City is
another example of a festival landscape. Other examples of such
landscapes include Bayside in Miami, Riverwalk in San Antonio and
Faneuil Hall in Boston.
Tear-downs – houses that new owners buy with the intention of
tearing it down to build a much larger home.
McMansions – large homes, often built to the outer limits of the lot.
They are called McMansions because of their super size and their
similar look.
Hinsdale, Illinois (25% of houses have been torn down in last 20 years).
Making Cities in the Global Core
• Redlining – financial institutions refusing to
lend money in certain neighborhoods.
• Blockbusting – realtors purposefully sell a
home at a low price to an African American
and then solicit white residents to sell their
homes and low prices, to generate “white
flight.”
Urban Sprawl
Unrestricted growth of housing,
commercial developments, and
roads over large expanses of
land, with little concern for
urban planning.
The primary reason for people
fleeing urban centers after WW
II during the 1960’s was
transportation networks made
outlying areas more accessible.
Henderson, Nevada
Urban Sprawl Terms
• Decentralization
• Suburbanization--transformation of large
• Edge City (part of the new
areas of land from rural to urban uses
suburban landscape, found • Counterurbanization--the process when
at the intersections of
people move away from the cbd due to
highway networks often
dissatisfaction with the urban policies and
including offices,
lifestyle
residences, and
entertainment venues)
• Office Park
• Peak Land value (decreases
as distance from CBD
increases) Intersection
• Shopping Mall
• Suburb
Celebration,
Florida
Gated Communities
Who are gated communities for?
How do the goals/purposes of gated communities
differ across the world?
Changing employment mix
•
•
•
•
Employment structure
Economic base (basic/nonbasic)
Globalization
Informal sector
Changing demographic and social
structures
• Postindustrial city
• Postmodern urban landscape
• Megalopolis: Boston to Washington, D.C.;
Miami to WPB; southern Cal; rust belt; TokyoYokohama-Kawasaki region is the world’s
largest; multi-metropolitan complex is formed
by the coalescence of two or more major
urban areas
Uneven development
• Ghettoization
• gentrification
• Megacity—city with 10 million or more,
fastest growing found in south and east Asia
Making Cities in the Global
Periphery and Semiperiphery
- sharp contrast
between rich and
poor
- Often lack zoning
laws or enforcement
of zoning laws-established patterns
of land use
8 of the 10 most
populated cities in
the world are in
LDCs.
Powerful social and
cultural forces shape the
character of a city and
create the cultural
landscape of the city.
Making Cities in the Priphery
• Slums:
– Shanty Towns
– Squatter Settlements
– Favelas
– Barrios
• Planning
• Foreign Influence
Ethnic Neighborhoods
• European City
– eg. Muslim neighborhoods in Paris
– Greenbelts: rings of open space surrounding European
cities like London to combat sprawl
– Preindustrial cities were poorly organized, unsanitary,
overcrowded, uncomfortable
– Cities in Eur have not yet experienced the dispersal
of the US, remain more compact and clustered
• Cities of the Periphery and Semiperiphery
– eg. Mumbai, India
– Chinatowns
Mumbai, India
Using the city you sketched in the last “Thinking
Geographically” question, consider the concepts
and processes introduced in this section of the
chapter and explain how people and institutions
created this city and the model you sketched.
Key Question:
What Role do Cities Play in
Globalization?
Global cities and megacities
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Colonial city
Emerging cities
Entrepôt
Gateway city
Great cities
Indigenous city
Medieval cities
Megacities
World city
World Cities
Cities that function at the global scale, beyond
the reach of the state borders, functioning as
the service centers of the world economy.
Times Square
New York City
Thinking through the challenges to the state
presented in Chapter 8, predict whether and under
what circumstances world cities could replace
states as the basic and most powerful form of
political organization in the world.