Unit 6: Cities and Urban Land-Use Patterns and Processes

Key Concepts:

• Central place theory: all market areas are focused on a central settlement that is a place of exchange and service provision
  • Holds that all market areas are focused on a central settlement that is a place of exchange and service provision
  • The market areas of settlements (hinterlands) overlap one another at different scales
• Large settlements = larger market areas, few in number
  • Have a larger number of services, which consumers are willing to travel large distances to access
• Small settlements = smaller, more numerous market areas
  • Have a smaller number of services, which are closer to consumers
• Research in the 1920s by German theorist Walter Christaller showed a hierarchy of places across the landscape that follow a regular pattern
  • Seven levels, from a small hamlet to the large regional service-center city
  • Used hexagons to represent individual market areas
  • Overlapped smaller-scale patterns with larger-scale layers of hexagonal market areas

Threshold and Range

• Threshold: the minimum number of people required to support a business
  • Partly calculated based on the earnings of the local population
• Range: the maximum distance that people are willing to travel to gain access to a service
  • Calculated in travel time that a consumer needs to get to a service location
  • Both are modified by income and travel time
• Traffic patterns become more important than distance in terms of how long it takes to reach a destination

Agglomeration

• Exists when similar business activities are found in a local cluster
  • (EX: Computer hardware and software firms in the Silicon Valley area south of San Francisco: this is due to close proximity to the high-tech growth poles of Stanford University and the NASA Ames Research Center.)
• Competition within markets is common in heavily populated areas
• Planning and zoning rules often push some businesses with similar building space requirements into the same local areas
• Manufacturers and corporate services often locate near one another in search of technical knowledge and labor-sharing

Urban Origins

• The origins of an urban place often have to do with one of two categorical factors:

1. Access to resources
2. Access to transportation

• Resource nodes: towns and cities that were founded due to access to natural resources
• Transport nodes: places that were founded as settlements due to their location as intersections of two or more lines of transportation
  • (Oceans, rivers, bays, trails, airports, roads, and rail lines)
• EX: the Gold Rush in California

Resource node: Sacramento, California (gold)

Transport node: San Francisco, California (port)

Settlement Patterns

• Clustered rural settlements: communities in which all of the residential and farm structures of multiple households are arranged closely together
  • Commonly seen in Europe and New England
  • Usually in places where peoples of the same culture group or clan settled nearby one another for social interaction, use of common land holdings, and security
• Dispersed rural settlements: households that are separated from one another by significant distances
  • Seen in the farm regions of the American South, Midwest, and Great Plains
  • No cultural or family relations on the agricultural frontier, making people less likely to settle near one another
• Circular settlements: generally a circle of homes surrounding a central open space
  • Found in medieval-era German and English towns, and enclosed villages of tribal herding communities in sub-Saharan Africa
• Linear settlements: tend to follow along a road or a stream front
  • Seen in French long lots

Site and Situation

• In terms of urban origins:
• Site: the physical characteristics of a place or its absolute location
• Situation: a place’s relationship with other locations, or its relative location
  • (EX: New York City’s site characteristic is that it lies on a large, deep, enclosed water harbor at the end of the navigable Hudson River, giving it an economic advantage during the colonial and postcolonial era.)
• Economic site factors such as land, labor, and capital can be used to estimate the capacity of industry and services to develop in a particular place

Housing and the Built Environment

• The built environment (schools, houses, workshops, stores, business, recreational facilities) has become the most important spatial environment for the majority of the world
• The World Health Organization (WHO) has determined that housing is an important factor in human health.
  • Needs to keep its residents dry, safe, and warm
  • Building codes and inspections ensure that safe buildings are built and maintained for home, school, and work use
  • Protect us from building near floodplains or dirty, polluted rivers and industries
  • Must be clean and provide safe drinking water and adequate sewage and garbage-removal systems
  • Must be attractive and well maintained

KNOW THE MODELS

• Concentric Zone Model: a model that represents the Anglo-American city of the United States and Canada during the height of industrialization
  • First published in 1923 by theorist Ernest Burgess

5 concentric rings:

• Central business district (CBD)

  • Contains the highest density of commercial land use
  • Characterized by verticality of buildings such as the tendency to build skyscrapers that maximize the use of one parcel of urban land
  • Contains the peak land value intersection: the downtown intersection surrounded by the most expensive pieces of real estate

• Industrial zone

  • An area of low-density commercial land that contains space-dependent activities such as factories, warehouses, rail yards, and port facilities
  • In the era of deindustrialization, many American and Canadian cities have rebuilt former industrial areas into festival landscapes
  • (EX: converting the spaces and buildings into parks, museums, sports stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and outdoor concert venues)

• Inner city housing

  • Since walking and streetcars were the main modes of transport in the early 1900s, most people tended to live as close to work as possible
  • Ranged from poor tenements and small apartments to row houses and townhouses for better-paid workers
  • Renovated through a process of gentrification: the economic reinvestment into existing buildings

• Suburbs

  • first planned developments with detached single-family homes began to appear on the periphery of American cities in 1870s
  • Victorian-era garden city movement: homes were designed to look like European farmhouses with front lawns, and were built for the growing urban middle class of Chicago
  • Home to a mostly middle-class to upper-class population

• Exurbs

  • Commuter zone: represents a wealthy area of people who own large tracts of land outside the city
  • Could be described as country estates
  • Suitcase farmers: those who worked in the city but kept farms outside of town
  • The owners of other exurban homes
  • Still retain the feel of the large country estate homes on multi-acre lots
  • Many suburban and exurban areas in large cities have pushed well into traditional agricultural areas
  • Prompted the development of a number of regulations, including farmland protection laws, minimum-acreage zoning, and development boundary zones
  • Bid-rent curve: represents the cost-to-distance relationship of real estate prices in the urban landscape
  • A cost function that shows the exponential increase in land prices as one moves closer toward the peak land value intersection

• Sector Model: combines the concepts of the industrial corridor and neighborhood for practical purposes, resulting in a much more realistic urban representation compared to the concentric zone model.

  • Also used to depict ethnic variations in the city
  • Standard central place model with the CBD at the center
  • Outside of the core business district, industrial space tended to be organized as a linear corridor surrounding a main transportation line
  • A corridor of upper-class housing extended outward from the CBD of several cities
  • Working-class neighborhoods radiate out from the CBD along the industrial corridor (recognized as ethnic neighborhoods by some theorists)
  • The middle-class areas of the city are broken into wide, separate areas radiating outward from downtown
  • White flight: people leaving inner-city areas of the United States

• Multiple-nuclei Model of urban structure: attempts to practically represent the urban landscape with neighborhoods and commercial corridors

  • Represents another evolutionary step in the conceptualization of the Anglo-American city
  • The first recognition of suburban business districts forming on the urban periphery
  • New suburban CBDs were emerging in post–World War II cities, and as suburbs spread outward, service industries followed
  • New areas of industrial development were also located on the urban periphery

• Galactic City Model or Peripheral Model

  • Represents the post-industrial city with its several, dispersed business districts
  • Represents a distinct decentralization of the commercial urban landscape as the economy has transitioned to services as the leading form of production
  • Specialization of manufacturing has meant that new manufacturing facilities tend to be much smaller and require low-cost land to afford to operate
  • Suburban retailing often occurs in multiple locations around the city
  • Retail center closer to the old CBD is likely an older center
  • Retail center located at the intersection of the belt highway and the artery leading out from the old CBD is likely a newer center

• Latin American City Model

  • Depicts the common urban landscapes of international locations
  • First presented by Larry Ford and Ernst Griffin in 1980
  • Important as an example of the colonial city as effects of European colonial rule on many cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia
  • Laws of the Indies: a number of colonial legal codes collectively enacted by the Spanish government in the New World
  • One of these laws dealt specifically with the planning and the layout of colonial cities

• The CBD

  • Plaza: a central square that reproduced the style of European cities such as Madrid
  • Centers of government, religion, and commerce surround the plaza
  • Vertically oriented and most large cities have a cluster of skyscrapers at their core

• The Commercial Spine

  • A main boulevard be constructed leading from the plaza to the outskirts of the city
  • Often the location for the homes of the wealthiest merchants and landowners
  • Today, many of these old homes have been replaced by office towers and high-rise condominiums

• The Zone of Elite Housing

  • an area of upper-class housing straddles the spine leading outward from the city center
  • social status was gained by having your home along these main avenue districts
  • the wealthiest people tend to live on the urban periphery

• The Zone of Maturity

  • Area of middle- to upper-class housing surrounds much of the CBD
  • Laws of the Indies segregated housing in Spanish colonial settlements
  • Only those of European descent were allowed to own homes and live within the city limits or walls

• The Zone of In Situ Accretion

  • The area outside of the city limits or walls where people of indigenous or mixed descent made their homes
  • Relied primarily on local timber and mud brick, known in some areas as adobe for building materials and architecture of housing
  • Are areas of middle-class and working-class housing today

• The Zone of Peripheral Squatter Settlements

  • Squatter settlements on the urban periphery are home to most of the urban poor in Latin America
  • Rise of industrialization and the numerous civil wars fought in rural regions, among other push and pull factors, led to an increase in rural-to-urban migration in the region
  • Squatters: people who settle on land that they don’t own
  • The land available on the urban periphery is owned by either governments or agricultural landowners
  • Land invasion: squatters that generally settle a new area overnight with a large number of families to avoid retributions from landowners and local police
  • Squatter camps can be quickly erected with makeshift homes using available building materials, such as scrap wood, plastic, and blue plastic tarps
  • As you move through to new squatter settlements farther out of the city, the quality of housing declines, as does the availability of utilities and other services such as bus lines
  • Land tenure: the legal right or title to the land upon which they build their homes

• Zones of Disamenity

  • Squatter communities closer to the center of the city
  • Built on land that is deemed unsuitable for standard homes and businesses, including steep hillsides, flood plains, old industrial sites, refuse dumps, and land near airports
  • Settled on because of their availability and due to their close proximity to work opportunities in the city center

• Southeast Asian City Model

  • Developed in 1967 by geographer Terrence Garry McGee
  • Contains some of the fastest growing and most densely populated cities in the world
  • Marked by high-rise developments, and some of the tallest buildings on Earth are located in this part of the world
  • Features a strip of upper-class housing stemming from the center, middle class residential areas close to the inner city, and the presence of squatter settlements on the periphery
  • Elements of a traditional CBD scattered throughout the model
  • Focused around the old colonial port zone, characteristic of a city centered around the export business
  • The Western commercial zone is functionally a CBD, but is populated primarily by Western rather than local businesses
  • The alien commercial zone is dominated by Chinese merchants who have migrated to these cities and typically reside in the same buildings as their businesses \n

• The Sub-Saharan African City Model

  • Developed by geographer Harm De Blij in 1968
  • The center of the model features three distinct CBDs that reflect the history of African urban development
  • The former colonial CBD is laid out on a grid pattern like that of many European cities, contains the most vertical development, and is connected to other parts of the city by major, planned roads
  • The traditional CBD is the center of most commercial activity and is characterized by traditional, mostly single-story architecture
  • The market zone is an open-air area in which informal business is periodically conducted curb-side or at stalls
  • The mining and manufacturing zone at the outskirts of the city is indicative of the major industries found in sub-Saharan Africa
  • The informal satellite townships surrounding the mining and manufacturing areas are largely composed of squatter settlements, or “shantytowns”

• International Urban Diversity

  • Cities around the world have very different urban forms and structure
  • Cities in Western Europe are much more compact in size than U.S. cities
  • Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union have Soviet era central planning
  • Micro districts: zones of uniform housing that provide worker housing near job sites
  • Cities in the developing world have widely divergent forms determined in large part by their religious makeup, colonial history, socialist influences, and many other cultural and urban land-use influences

KNOW THE CONCEPTS

Suburbanization

• Though many people live in suburban apartments and townhouses, the detached single-family home is the dominant feature on the American suburban landscape.
• The suburbs are predominantly middle-class, economically. However, many upper-class suburbs exist, as do some lower-class suburban neighborhoods.
• The first suburban single-family homes appeared in the1890s.
• The original American suburbs were culturally populated by WASPs. This changed between the late 1960s and the 1980s when suburbs become more integrated with Catholic and non-white middle-class populations, who formerly lived in inner-city areas.
• In the 2010 census, just over 50 percent of the U.S. the population lived in suburban areas.
• Suburbs continue to expand outward and are the largest zones within urban models.

Home Mortgage Finance and Suburban Growth

• In the post of World War II United States, homeownership increased significantly as a result of federal home loan programs such as the G.I. Bill.
• Other federal programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration and the public finance mortgage corporations radically increased the number of mortgages available to the American public with regulated interest rates and limited processing fees.
• Demand was so high that factory-style housing construction methods that used prefabricated parts and specialized construction teams like Levittowns were common

Service Relocation in the Suburbs

• The boom in suburban home construction prompted a number of small service providers to locate in suburban areas
• Featured basic services like food, the family doctor, fuel, and auto repair, as well as non-basic services such as dry-cleaning and gift shops
• The combination of middle-class flight from the inner city and the deindustrialization of urban manufacturing economies prompted even more and larger service providers to relocate to suburban areas
• Two factors causing people to leave cities were at work:

1. Service providers realized much of their consumer base moved away from the old CBDs that had been the traditional service centers
2. Many service firms such as banks, insurance companies, and other white-collar businesses realized their labor force was moving farther and farther out from the old CBD

• Suburban sprawl: the expansion of housing, transportation, and commercial development to undeveloped land on the urban periphery
• A number of suburban political anti-growth movements have emerged in the United States and Canada
  • Groups push for new laws and regulations that slow suburban development and limit approval of new suburban roads and highways
  • (EX: Loudoun County, Virginia, where in the 1990s, the county board of supervisors enacted a series of growth boundaries that set minimums for the lot sizes of new homes)
• Counterurbanization: the movement of inner-city or suburban residents to rural areas to escape the congestion, crime, pollution, and other negative aspects of the urban landscape

Edge Cities

• First put forward by journalist Joel Garreau in 1991
• To be considered an edge city, a suburban CBD would have the following characteristics:
  • Minimum of 5 million square feet of office space
  • Minimum 600,000 square feet of retail space
  • No city government, except where built atop an existing town
  • High daytime population, low nighttime population
  • Located at transportation nodes or along commuter corridors
• Edge city growth has largely increased lateral commuting in many large metropolitan areas between suburbs and edge cities
  • Significant amounts of counter-commuting have been detected from downtown residences to edge city locations

City Types

• Colonial City
  • Colonial cities: cities with origins as centers of colonial trade or administration are classified together
  • Many of these cities retained their European-style buildings and street networks
  • Newly independent governments have often changed street names and place-names to reflect local culture and social history
• Fall-Line Cities
  • Fall-line cities: the ports that lay upstream on coastal rivers at the point where navigation was no longer possible by ocean-going ships
  • Fall-line: where a river’s tidal estuary transitions to an upland stream at the first set of river falls
  • These were economic break-in-bulk points (or break-of-bulk) where ships were offloaded and then packed with outgoing trade
• Medieval Cities
  • Medieval cities: urban centers that predate the European Renaissance, roughly 1400 C.E.
  • Originally settled during the Roman era and developed into significant centers of trade and population during the medieval period
  • (EX: Istanbul, Turkey)
• Gateway Cities
  • Gateway cities: places where immigrants make their way into a country
  • Tend to have significant immigrant populations
  • (EX: New York City)
• Entrepôt
  • Entrepôt: a port city in which goods are shipped in at one price and shipped out to other port locations at a higher price, resulting in profitable trade
  • Made possible by the lack of customs duties (import and export taxes) that are common in most other port cities
  • Tend to become large centers of finance, warehousing, and the global shipping trade
  • (EX: Dubai, Singapore)
• Megacities
  • Megacity: a metropolitan area with more than 10 million people
  • EX: Mexico City in Mexico (21.6 million), Dhaka in Bangladesh (19.6 million), Cairo in Egypt (20.0million), and Mumbai in India (20.0 million)
• Megalopolis
  • Megalopolis: the merging of the urbanized areas of two or more cities, generally through suburban growth and expansion
  • Name given by French geographer Jean Gottmann following his travels through the Northeastern United States during the 1950s
  • Other megalopolises may form in coming decades, which may challenge Tokyo for the world’s largest conurbation, or combined city
  • (EX: Tokaido: Tokyo, Yokohama)
• World City
  • World city designation signifies a metropolitan area as a global center for finance, trade, and commerce
  • World cities are ranked in levels of importance, and provide an example of urban hierarchy at a global scale
  • First-order world cities are New York City, London, and Tokyo
  • Second-order world cities are Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, Zürich, Hong Kong, São Paulo, and Singapore
  • Third-order world cities are Miami, Toronto, Seoul, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, and Sydney
• Primate Cities
  • Primate city: when the largest city in a country has at least twice the population of the country’s next largest city
  • The situation of urban primacy is sometimes blamed when there is uneven economic development within a country
  • Rank-size rule: a country’s second largest city is half the size of its largest city; the third-largest city is one-third the size of the largest city; and so on, such that the eighth largest city is one-eighth the size of the largest city
  • Formula: The nth largest city is 1/n the size of the country’s largest city.

Urban Society

Segregation

• De facto segregation: where no law requiring ethnic or racial segregation exists, yet they nonetheless remain zones of separation.
• Historically, legal or “de jure” segregation existed in the United States in a number of ethnic and racial situations
  • (EX: The segregation laws against African Americans in the “Jim Crow” American South)
• Chinatowns are often seen as cultural districts, but many have their origins as zones where Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese migrants were forced to live
• Redlining: designating neighborhoods on company maps where home mortgage and insurance applications would be automatically denied
  • Historically used by banks, insurers, and real estate companies
• Restrictive covenants: means of racial discrimination through the real estate system
  • Homeowners added special covenants to their home real estate titles, restricting future sale of a home to white-only buyers
• Some white urban communities openly engaged in racial steering, mainly through the use of real estate agents
  • When non-whites attempted to buy homes, real estate companies or their agents purposefully drove them to racially specific neighborhoods, regardless of their income or ability to pay for a house.
• Many real estate agents and developers also profited from racial prejudice in a common practice called blockbusting
• Agents would convince white homeowners to sell their homes quickly and cheaply by leading them to believe that minorities were moving into their neighborhoods and that property values would consequently decline. They would then sell those homes at a considerable profit to prosperous non-whites looking to escape the inner city.

Urban Social Change

• A distinct social pattern of invasion and succession typifies the long-term turnover of neighborhood social and ethnic composition
  • One ethnic group or economic class leaves a neighborhood and is replaced by another over time

Women and the City

• The percentage of female-headed households in urban areas has increased significantly in recent decades
• Geographer Susan Hansen’s work shows that the commuting patterns of female heads of household are different from male commuters
• The roles of women in American and Canadian society have changed significantly in recent decades
  • Women make up half of the urban labor force
  • Women are increasingly equal (but not yet equal) to men in terms of pay, access to management positions, and political power

Urban Economies

• Gentrification: the economic reinvestment in existing real estate
• Deindustrialization left many older areas of cities neglected and economically depressed and many gentrifiers saw the opportunity to take old homes and storefronts and convert them into attractive modern accommodations.
  • People in the historical preservation movement began renovating homes in places such as Greenwich Village in New York City and Georgetown in D.C.
  • The whole cottage industry in gentrification had emerged in which flippers bought old homes at low prices, renovated the homes to contemporary standards, and resold them at handsome profits
• Has driven out low-income residents from the community as finding new homes often becomes difficult, and displaced elderly persons can become a costly social welfare program issue for city governments

Urban Economic Growth

• urban governments and investors are concerned with the infrastructure requirements of cities
• economic growth tends to occur only in urban areas where utilities, transportation, safety, health, and education needs are met in terms of access and capacity
• by making the city attractive to young, educated businesspeople, the hope is that major service industry firms in high-paying fields such as technology, computing, research and development, and other creative industries such as media and advertising will relocate downtown
• companies tend to locate their offices near significant growth poles for their industry
• economic multiplier effects around centers have resulted in a multitude of companies and investment in computer hardware and software development

Urban Sustainability

• The sustainability of urban growth and development is measured in economic and environmental terms
• Political attitudes and practical considerations often create a multitude of problems for urban government leaders and policymakers
• City governments must address economic sustainability in terms of public services like transportation, utilities, health care access, public housing, and the most expensive: education
• Since deindustrialization, large city governments have had the difficult job of balancing depressed commercial tax revenues with the high cost of maintaining municipal services
• To combat the high costs of running urban governments is to combine the municipal governments of the core city with the multiple town governments of the surrounding suburbs

The Expense of Schools

• The property taxes collected on homes often do not meet the cost and demand for high- quality schools in areas of the country
• Resistance by homeowners to increased taxes is often expressed by voting down school bond levies, which raise money by increasing property taxes
• School systems are caught between a public that does not want to pay higher taxes and parents who demand higher-quality schools
• Local school districts are increasingly dependent on state governments to help meet funding needs

Urban Transportation

• Traffic congestion plagues many cities in the United States and Canada
  • Public pressure on local politicians to come up with solutions
• Local leaders are often restricted in what they can do in terms of building highways because of the high cost of road construction and federal clean air regulations that limit emissions

Air pollution from cars has two scales of environmental impact:

1. Locally, smog from vehicle emissions is harmful to public health and can create an unsightly haze
2. Globally, carbon dioxide emissions from cars are a significant source of greenhouse gases that contribute to the problem of global warming

• The benefits of mass transit are having fewer cars on the highway, reduced emissions, and increased accessibility for low-income citizens

New Downtown Housing

• Environmentally beneficial because it stops suburban housing sprawl from encroaching on farmland or sensitive environments such as wetlands, coastal zones, forests, or habitats of endangered species

• New downtown housing can also have the added environmental benefit of reducing transportation impacts, fossil fuel use, and air pollution by having workers live downtown close to their jobs

• Brownfield remediation: a process in which hazardous contaminants are removed or sealed off from former industrial sites

• Mixed-use buildings contain both housing and commercial space

  • New Urbanism developments

• Many cities have enacted zoning laws, which separate commercial and residential space

• The purchase and rental prices of many new downtown housing units are so high that only the upper-middle-class income-earners can afford to live there

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