Urban Geography

I

Introduction

Urban Geography, sub-discipline of geography, especially human geography, concerned with the study of towns and cities, including both their internal characteristics and structure, and the spatial and other relationships between them.

II

Historical Development

Urban geography appeared quite late as a distinct branch of geography; the first textbook on the subject appeared only in the 1940s. In those early days, it was closely related to regional geography, then the dominant approach to studying human beings in relation to their environment. Individual towns and cities were studied under five commonly used headings: situation, which placed the town in its regional context; site, which placed it in its physical context; morphology (or form), which described the town’s internal structure; function, which described its main economic activities; and evolution, which described its historical development. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, urban geographers became leading proponents of a new approach to geography generally, and human geography in particular. A reaction to the emphasis on the uniqueness of places and on description that characterized the regional approach, this was an effort to turn geography into a true science that emphasized quantitative methods and a structural approach to spatial relationships. The “quantitative revolution”, as it is often called, was readily taken up by urban geographers not least because much of the earlier theoretical work that was rediscovered at this time was concerned with urban areas, although it had been largely done by non-geographers. Of particular importance were the central place theories of the German geographer Walter Christaller and economist August Lösch, developed in the 1920s, and the urban-structure models developed between the 1920s and the 1940s by sociologists at the Chicago School of Human Ecology, in the United States.

These two types of model illustrate two important themes that run through urban geography. Central place theory provided a method of analysing the relationships between places, in particular the structural hierarchies governing the spatial distribution of settlements of different sizes and with different economic and social functions. The urban-structure models examined relationships within cities. Prime among these was the concentric zone model, in which the central business districts in the centre of the metropolitan areas are encircled successively by zones of factories and warehouses, low-income housing, middle-income housing, and commuter suburbs.

During this period, much of the research undertaken involved the empirical testing and refinement of models, such as the influential work on central place theory of the Anglo-American geographer Brian Berry, in the United States. Such work led to the examination of systems of cities, using, in particular, systems theory analysis borrowed from the natural sciences. Other ideas borrowed from the natural sciences at this time include the rank-size rule and gravity models. The rank-size rule predicts a relationship between the size of all cities in a system (or country) and the size of the largest, or primate, city. Thus, the second-ranked city might be half the size of the primate city, the third ranked one third the size, and so on. The idea of primacy was thought to be particularly useful in the study of city systems in economically developing countries. Gravity models introduced the idea of distance decay into urban relationships, suggesting, for example, that the further away from a city people lived, the less they would visit it. At the same time, larger cities would attract people from greater distances than smaller ones. The sociological associations of the urban-structure models led to attempts in the 1960s to identify distinct social areas in cities and the relationships between them. Much of this work involved sophisticated statistical techniques, such as social area analysis, which were only possible because the newly available computers enabled the processing of huge amounts of data.

As criticisms of the quantitative-spatial approach increased towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, many urban geographers adopted behavioural techniques, for example investigating motivation and attitudes in the behaviour of shoppers or housebuyers. However, the theoretical basis for such studies remained largely unchanged, in that they made the same assumptions, based on Neo-Classical economics, about free choice in decision-making and maximization of benefit as earlier models, and was thus subject to similar criticisms. The managerialist thesis was another response to criticisms of the quantitative-spatial approach. This thesis suggested that individuals were not free to make decisions in the way earlier behavioural studies had suggested. Their decisions were constrained by urban managers, or gatekeepers. Examples of urban gatekeepers include building society managers and other financial lenders. Therefore, for example, the development of identifiable social areas was not just the result of individual preferences, but also included the effects of the gatekeepers on the exercise of those preferences.

III

Research Methods

In early urban geography, the principal techniques were observation, classification, and detailed descriptive mapping. In the era of spatial analysis, mapping was still important but was used as a tool of primary data collection for theory testing. Increasingly during this period, behavioural techniques, such as questionnaires and surveys, were employed. In contemporary urban geography the wide range of methods employed reflects the sub-disciplines that now account for most urban study. Methods include text analysis, use of published statistics, and interviews or participatory research for qualitative and quantitative analysis. These are used to investigate such themes as suburbanization, industrial relocation, the privatization of local government services, and race or gender issues. Detailed analysis of urban data by modern computer-based tools, such as geographical information systems, is used in, for example, identifying market areas for supermarkets or refining provision of health services.

IV

Recent Trends

During the early 1970s a new approach to geography emerged that found its theoretical and practical groundings in the social and economic theories of Karl Marx. Dubbed radical geography, it was partly a response to the social, urban and racial unrest in advanced industrialised societies at the time, and the evidence this seemed to provide of structural contradictions in capitalist economies. The proponents of radical geography pointed out that decision-making could only be taken within the political and economic structure that prevailed. In attempts to explain urban conditions of any kind, it was the study of these causal structures that was important, rather than their outward results. Although radicalism was common to the whole of human geography, urban geography became one of its principal concerns. In particular, the work of the British geographer David Harvey, published as Social Justice and the City (1973), was extremely influential in providing a theoretical basis for the use of structural Marxism. Central to his ideas was the way in which social processes, and spatial forms are related, which he examined in the context of four particular themes: the nature of theory; the nature of space; the nature of social justice; and the nature of urbanism. Harvey saw cities as distinct socio-economic and political structures. Later, though, other radical urban geographers suggested that it was not helpful to distinguish urban places as something separate. Urban problems, they argued, were simply manifestations of problems that affected society as a whole, and that resulted from the prevailing political economy. Another difficulty in identifying urban places as distinct entities is that in the economically developed world the process of suburbanization (or counter urbanization) has led to a decreasing distinction between town and country. This problem, however, is not the case in most economically developing countries, where, in general, the boundary between urban and rural is still very abrupt.

For such reasons, urban geography has recently become more diffuse. It is less readily identifiable as a distinct area of research, even though it is still widely taught. Apart from the problems of recognizing distinct urban areas, increasing specialization among researchers has meant that much work formerly done by urban geographers is now done, for example, by cultural or social geographers.