APHG Chapter 15

Chapter 15 - URBAN SETTLEMENTS

Pages 403 - 428

15.1 THE ORIGIN AND INFLUENCES OF URBANIZATION

For most of human history, the vast majority of people lived in rural areas. During the Neolithic Period (about 10,000 b.c.e.), agricultural advances allowed more people to live in permanent or semipermanent settlements, which eventually grew into cities. They settled in these early cities for a variety of purposes, including trade, defense, and religion.

Urbanization—the process of the development of dense concentrations of people into settlements

Urbanization also led to the rise of cities in places such as the Nile River Valley, the Indus River Valley, and the Wei River Valley in China, but for thousands of years only a small minority of the world’s population was made up of urban dwellers.

Urbanization increased rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as factories sprang up in cities and attracted people in search of jobs. Ever since then, new cities have been developing around the world, and 55% of the world lives in Urban Areas.

That number will keep growing (751 million in 1950 to 4.2 billion in 2018). The total population of urban settlers depends on how a country defines what an urban center is.

An  urban area  is defined as a city and its surrounding suburbs.

Beyond this basic definition, the concept of what is urban varies considerably. For example, the US Census Bureau has its own definition. While other countries use a different criteria, like the European Commission. Only a few countries consider population density as a measure of urbanization. 

Rural areas are generally characterized as open swaths of land with few buildings or other structures and a low population density. In most rural areas, agriculture is the primary industry.

Cities and towns provide for their residents political, medical, financial aid, and education services and transportation and communcations.

Though a city may have set boundaries, its area of influence often extends that. This is a: 

metropolitan area: includes a city and the surrounding areas that are influenced economically and culturally by the city.

An example of this may be Greater New York or Greater Los Angeles.

The suburbs of a city are the less densely populated residential and commercial areas surrounding a city. Many people who live in suburbs commute into the city to work and to enjoy the city’s culture.

The origin, functions, and growth of a city depend in varying degrees on its site and situation. A city’s site is the actual place or location of the settlement and the land on which the city was built.

Site factors include the landforms, climate, availability of water, soil quality, and natural resources of the land.

 A city’s situation, on the other hand, refers to the connections between its site and other sites. A city with a favorable situation has easy access to trading partners, resources, and other connections, which fuels growth and economic development.

Sites:

Certain sites in the landscape are more attractive, like natural resources, location on a trade route, land that is easy to defend and more. Usually people prefer flat topography for building, but if defense is an issue, they may prefer an elevated location with lots of hills and mountains, like Ancient greece.

Key natural resources like iron, gold, and silver fuel the growth of settlements, an example being in South Africa where a town grew fast when diamonds were found.

Sites located on transportation systems attract settlements as well. Areas that were near a harbor provided boats and ships, good for trade, and islands defended them from attacks.

Many cities are on natural harbors, like NYC, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, and more. There are also cities located on rivers and narrows.

Trade routes also played a significant role in the sites where cities are located. Cities are often built where rivers meet (for trade) or where trade routes converge.

When the railroad was created, railway junctions became influential to dictating the site of new communities. Business wants to be near trade routes (for less transportation expenses), cities arose where goods had to be moved from one mode of transport to another, and People were needed to provide the labor, and warehouses were built to house goods until the next leg of the journey.

Factors that make for a quality site can change as technology advances. If a new technology is created like waterpower, many people will settle near fall lines where waterfalls and rapids gave power to factories. (A fall line is the narrow strip of land that marks the geological boundary between an upland region and a plain.)

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, factories took advantage of the power provided by rivers along the Atlantic fall line, a 900-mile ribbon of land between the Piedmont and the Atlantic Coastal Plain, giving rise to some of the largest U.S. cities of this time.

Situation:

 A city’s situation is equally important to its origins, functions, and growth—or decline.

The relative location of a city dictates its functions, as trade has been important throughout human history, it's not surprising to find urban areas along major trade networks. An example being Aleppo (in Syria), which was built at the crossroad of trade routes.

The advantages of a city’s situation might change over time as new technologies lessen the impact of old connections. Before the Erie Canal, port cities like Baltimore and New Orleans were more important than NYC.

As trade networks have changed, new cities have grown to take advantage of new connections. For example, In the United States, the Transcontinental Railroad gave rise to the city of Omaha.

In Russia, the Trans-Siberian Railroad similarly led to the development of Novosibirsk. Even today, as globalization fuels transport of goods across the ocean, the largest cities are port cities, near the sea.

15.2 FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE URBAN GROWTH

One of the most influential factors in urban growth is transportation. Waterways, railroads, and highways provide a means for raw materials to get to factories, for goods to get to market, and for workers to access jobs.

Ongoing advancements in transportation and communication technologies continue to influence urban growth. Transportation systems often make it possible for manufacturing facilities, as well as retail and office environments, to relocate to suburbs where residential  areas are plentiful.

Advances in transportation had a profound impact on settlement patterns in the United States. During the colonial period, early cities like Boston and NYC were built near the Atlantic or rivers to facilitate trade. These cities benefited much from their site.

Communication advances have also influenced the growth of cities. For centuries, the main communication networks were the trade networks, as information traveled along with goods.

This changed in the 19th century, with the advent of the telegraph and, later, the telephone. These and later advances in telecommunications technologies revolutionized business and how people lived and worked.

The telephone made business more efficient. Factories located in cities took phone orders from customers in far cities, which increased production, and gave more jobs.

More recently, similar changes have taken place due to communication and computer technologies. Today, high-speed internet and wi-fi services allow businesses to instantly communicate, both internally and with their customers. Like with the birth of the phone, it had similar benefits.

Like any change, advances in communications do not affect all areas equally. Urban areas (areas with more population) or prioritized, and businesses look for locations with strong communication networks. Internet access is as important as rivers were back in the day.

The telecommunications industry itself also fuels urban growth, giving jobs to thousands, especially where people are educated, like in California where there are dozens of technological hubs.

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15.3 THE SIZE AND DISTRIBUTION  OF CITIES

Cities and towns do not operate independently. Rather, they are part of interdependent systems that function at regional, national, and international scales.

Urban places are a combination of human interactions with natural and human-made environments. They change based on these interactions.

Individual cities within any urban system differ in size and influence. Many ancient city-states gained power by conquering and subjugating other cities, while others gained power because of its importance in trade routes.

As in ancient times, modern cities operate within an interconnected urban hierarchy. Bigger cities (more people) are higher, and small cities are lower on the hierarchy. Cities may have a specific function (tourism, arts, education, finance, etc)

Geographers analyze the spatial relationships between these places  with models like the gravity model, rank -size rule, primate-city rule, and central place theory.

Gravity Model

The gravity model is used to explain the relationship between cities of various sizes. According to the model, the level of spatial interaction—such as trade, traffic flow, number of visitors, and communication—between two cities depends on the size of the cities’ population and the distance between them. 

In urban geography, the gravity model is used to discuss the degree to which two places interact with one another. By the model, cities have influence based on size.

The model assumes that the interaction of people and goods between cities is generally proportional to the product of their populations (or output of goods) and inversely proportional to the distance between them.

The gravity model has been used to predict whether people will be more likely to visit, shop, or do business in one city over another. According to the model, a large city will have  a greater pull than a smaller community.

Though, it is important to note that the gravity model and all models are based on theories that assume cities are on a flat surface without regarding the physical geography and natural or political boundaries that come into play.

So while the model is useful in making generalizations, other factors will come into play when applying the findings to real-world scenarios.

Rank-Size Rule

The places people live, from tiny hamlets to megacities, are linked to form interconnected, interdependent urban systems. 

The  rank-size rule  is a geographic concept that describes these relationships.

Rank-Size Rule: explains how the population size of cities within a country may be distributed. It uses a country’s largest city as a baseline and ranks all other cities in relation to it. The rule states the second largest city will be one-half the size of the largest city, the third largest city will be one-third the size of the largest city, and so on.

Largest City:  1. 4 million

           2. 2 million (½)

           3. 1.33 million ( ⅓)

4. 1 million (¼)

5. 800,000 ( ⅕)

Starts at ½ then keeps going down the fraction ladder.

 As another example, if the population of the largest city is 12 million, the second most populous city will have about six million people, the third will have about four million, and the fourth will have about three million.

Not all countries exhibit such patterns; some follow the primate-city rule, which you’ll learn about below. 

Libya, Nigeria, Australia, and Brazil are examples of countries in which the rank-size rule is fairly accurate. 

RANK-SIZE RULE LIMITATIONS

But note that the rule is not exact. It applies to some countries more than others and there are exceptions based on real-world factors, since the model doesn’t take into account the country’s size, distance between cities, and differs whether the metropolitan area is cohen or just the city (metro area is better).

In some countries, the rank-size rule does not apply because of the disproportionate size of one city.

Primate City: is a city that far exceeds, in population size and influence, the country’s next largest city.

Where a primate city exists, the country will have few or no other large or medium-sized cities. 

The existence of a primate city indicates an unbalanced level of development in a country because the population is disproportionately pulled to the city for economic opportunities.

 An example of a primate city is in Mexico City, Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo, and more.

Many primate cities can trace their origin to a colonial past, when European colonizers concentrated political and economic activities in one place.  For example, Dakar, the colonial capital of Senegal, has a population of 3.1 million, nearly six times the size of Touba, Senegal’s next largest city.

German geographer Walter Christaller developed  central place theory  to explain the hierarchical patterns in the number, size, and location of cities and other settlements. 

The theory, published in 1933, describes a central place as a settlement that provides goods and services for the surrounding area.

 There are several types of settlements within an urban hierarchy. The city is a large, central place around which smaller towns, villages, and hamlets are distributed. 

Central place theory observes a pattern and order in this distribution. This pattern is based on consumers’ behavior and decision-making regarding the goods and services on which they spend their money

PICTURE:

The main function of cities and towns, according to the theory, is to provide goods and services to the people living in the surrounding area.

The size and location of a central place is determined by the market’s threshold: the number of people needed to support a certain good or service and Range:  the distance that someone is willing to travel for a good or service.

 High-order goods and services—those that are more expensive, desirable, or unique—have larger thresholds and ranges than low-order goods and services do.

 High-order goods and services are located in cities that have the minimum threshold to support them. High-order goods include items like luxury cars, high- end fashion, and works of art, while high-order services include professional sports events, museums, and cultural festivals.

These goods draw people from small settlements and rural areas. Meanwhile, low-order goods like things in grocery stores, barber shops, hair salons, are less likely to be visited by long distance travellers.

These consumer choices create a hierarchy of places, from many hamlets and villages offering low-order goods and services to fewer towns and cities offering high-order goods and services.

Within this urban hierarchy, cities serve larger populations and are located far apart from one another, while towns and other, smaller communities are closer together and distributed in a pattern between the cities.

Cities provide a greater variety of goods and services than towns, and thus cities become the core around which increasingly smaller communities that offer fewer and less varied goods and services are found.

Small settlements in an urban system provide only the goods and services that meet people’s everyday needs, and these services will be close together because people are not willing to travel long distances for lower-order goods like groceries or gasoline. People in these smaller towns occasionally travel to a city to take advantage of higher-order shopping or cultural events.

The pattern that results is best illustrated as a series of hexagons with the highest-order market center—the city—in the center. Towns will be arranged around the city, equally spaced apart. Villages, which are lower-order market centers, are distributed around each town. Hamlets, the lowest-order market centers, are dispersed between each of the larger settlements. Image below:

CENTRAL PLACE THEORY LIMITATIONS

Central place theory has limitations. The theory doesn’t account for real-world geography. Like many other models it is based on a flat surface with no barriers and equal transportation, not accounting for political or natural barriers.

 In reality, natural features such as waterways or mountains often act as deterrents to the regular spacing of communities. 

Likewise, transportation networks are not uniform between all settlements, so that the range for goods and services is not the same in every direction. 

In addition, central place theory assumes that the retail market is the most important influencer, but many cities serve other functions and are important as administrative or government centers. 

Still, central place theory is useful for gaining an understanding that there is a hierarchy of settlements and a pattern in their spatial distribution. Larger cities are generally spaced farther apart than are smaller towns and villages.

15.4 Cities and Globalization

Cities exist on every continent except Antarctica. Some are huge and increasing.

But they are growing fastest in peripheral countries such as Yemen, Mali, Afghanistan, and Nigeria as well as the semi-peripheral countries of India and China. 

Cities have grown rapidly in the last several decades.  In 1950, only two metropolitan areas—New York and Tokyo—had populations of more than 10 million people,  a threshold used to define a city as a  megacity .  

Mega City: Population with more than 20 million people 

According to the United Nations, there were 33 megacities in 2018, and by 2030 that number will have risen to 43. 

Many metropolitan areas that are growing into megacities are found in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries in Asia and Africa. The unprecedented growth of megacities has caused the UN to coin a new term: a  metacity  has more than 20 million people.

The primary driving force behind massive urban growth in the periphery is population growth. As said before, countries in the periphery have high birth rates, and many young people migrate to urban (from rural) areas to start a family, which increases urban population.

There are also many other factors like push and pull factors (lack of employment, not meeting ends meet, etc)

At the top of the world’s urban hierarchy are  world cities . World cities, sometimes called global cities, have influence not only over their country or region, but also across the globe. 

Geographers studying cities and urbanization note that the major cities of the world make up a network of economic, social, and information flows. 

World cities act as nodes, or focal points, of this network, and as such, they play an important role within the world system.

World cities have many functions of influence, they are major centers for communications, banking, and finance and sites of leading global markets for commodities, investment, and foreign exchange.

Many major companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are located in world cities, and these cities are also home to massive fashion, entertainment, and cultural industries.

World cities aren’t necessarily the largest (in population), rather they are world cities because of their influence. 

World cities have international airports and serve as destinations both for visitors and migrants. World cities also have many connections and interactions with other cities across the globe. They have particular kinds of services—such as banking, advertising, accounting, and legal services—that are important in the globalizing world.

Geographers commonly group world cities into tiers depending on the extent of their influence, with top-tier world cities being primary nodes in the global economy, with cities like New York City, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris.

As you have learned, cities are part of an interconnected urban system. World cities in particular are connected globally and are drivers of globalization. Multinational corporations often have a major presence in several world cities, creating strong linkages among them. 

Large corporation presence attracts banks and transportation services which further grows the connections between world cities and the globe.

World cities are also centers of innovation, manufacturing, and trade. World cities give birth to new ideas, goods, and services, which are then exported through diffusion to other parts of the world.

Culture can spread quickly from world cities to the rest of the world, with the presence of things like Hollywood and Bollywood.

Cities up and down the world city hierarchy compete in multiple ways to gain a more prominent role in that hierarchy. Governments seek to attract more people through investments, business, events, concerts, championships, etc.

A world city’s role on the global stage affects its identity and its culture, and certain elements within a world city sometimes become intertwined with its identity. ALL World Cities have iconic places when people think about these cities. Like the eiffel tower or the statue of liberty.

These iconic places attract tourists, but they also become symbols of the cities in which they are located, in the minds of the people who live there and those who have never set foot in the place.