Cities and Their Vital Systems Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (1988) / Chapter Skim
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3 How Cities Grew in the Western World: A Systems Approach
3 How Cities Grew in the Western World: A Systems Approach
Pages 71-84
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From page 71... ...
It is important to note that urban growth has been neither automatic nor uniform but has exhibited consistent patterns linked to structure and function. Many of the dynamic influences on city size demographic change, migration, transportation, technology, and communications- have af 71
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From page 72... ...
Smaller market towns, roughly equidistant from Leicester, offered simpler goods and services to the surrounding villages, but the county's highest order central place was the only locus of political authority, as well as the site of courts and tax collections. Royal administrators working from London contacted officials in Leicester, who spread information throughout the region.
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From page 73... ...
Building on its ties to Constantinople, the city became the trading gateway between a rapidly developing European periphery and a thriving eastern economy that stretched through Arab and Byzantine lands to China. In time, mercantile wealth and naval power reinforced one another to undermine the dominance of the Middle East and to create a Venetian maritime empire.
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From page 74... ...
In the latter, principal centers may well be clustered, as in northern Italy and the Low Countries during the Middle Ages or along the East Coast in contemporary America; or they may surround an inland sea, each serving as a gateway to a region of the interior, as Braudel (1966) so vividly illustrated for the case of the Mediterranean.
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From page 75... ...
At a time of relatively low population density and weak political centralization, the most common urban type was the market town in which the predominantly rural population could sell its surplus and buy locally manufactured goods. Central place systems of cities fed by short-distance and step-by-step migration grew up in most parts of western and southern Europe, as well as England.
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From page 76... ...
Population growth remained relatively slow, hindered by plague, war, and famine. Economic competition undermined the prosperity of Mediterranean towns; empires in the Americas brought both costs and benefits to cities along the Atlantic coast (Hohenberg and Lees, 19851.
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From page 77... ...
The political centralization of kingdoms, with the associated power to levy increased taxes and rents, brought growth to the top levels of urban hierarchies at the expense of smaller towns. In several cases for example, France, Spain, and southern Italy centralization and exploitation led to primacy in urban size distributions as oversized capitals (Paris, Madrid, Naples)
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78 _` Cal Ct U
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From page 79... ...
Industrial activities congregated in ports and national centers. But the expansion of service employment ranging from retail trade and construction to intellectual, artistic, and scientific pursuits alongside finance and administration accounted for much of the growth.
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From page 80... ...
In the twentieth century, rising land prices in combination with the decentralizing potential of the internal combustion engine and the mass ownership of automobiles have permitted the dispersion of routine production tasks. In the longer run, chemical factories shifted away from Paris (Gaillard, 1977)
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From page 81... ...
HOW CITIES GREW IN THE WESTERN WORLD TABLE 3-2 Leading Cities of the European Hierarchy in 1750, 1850, and 1950 (population in thousands)
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From page 82... ...
Ideally, the network city is politically autonomous because governmental centralization inhibits the fluidity of those interurban ties on which network cities thrive. The most economically successful trading cities of the past places such as Venice, Hamburg, and Amsterdam remained on the peripheries of European nation-states during their periods of dominance (Rokkan, 19751.
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From page 83... ...
Whereas formerly independent German trading cities have maintained traditions of large-scale public investment in services and municipal buildings, the level of such expenditures in France and Spain, countries where even network cities have been kept under relatively strong central control, has been low. Urban resources and the infrastructures they generate vary with the nature of a city's exchange relations.
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From page 84... ...
Papers and Proceedings of the Regional Science Association 20:65-68. Vigier, F
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