ancient cities

872 Urban Geography
economies, environmental challenges, and the spatial
expression of everyday life. Arguably, urban
geography is geography’s most eclectic subfield
and, until recently, urban studies’ least acknowledged
one. The eclecticism of urban geography
reflects the tendency of geography to absorb each
successive decade’s new discoveries in theory and
methodology as well as changing urban conditions.
Inclined to borrow theoretical insight from
other disciplines within urban studies, geography’s
newly found prominence rests on its unique
spatial perspective on the important questions of
contemporary urban life.
Analytical Urban Geography
Although rich case studies documenting the development
of particular cities and various urban traditions
(such as the form of German towns) existed
prior to the 1950s, that decade is generally associated
with urban geography’s systematic study of
cities and urban networks. Influenced by cultural
and historical geography’s interest in the human–
environment relationship, early urban work focused
on the issues of site (i.e., characteristics of a particular
location) and situation (i.e., relative location)
in the development of individual cities. The
emphasis was on a theme—urban morphology or
the physical patterns of the urban environment—
that has been long-standing in geography, particularly
in Europe where analysis of townscapes and
morphological regions was common. Arguing for
the need to move beyond mere description, U.S.
urban geographers drew from a mix of traditional
geography, neoclassical economics, the Chicago
School of Sociology, and contemporary concerns
in city planning.
These urban geographers adopted the modernist
goals of the social sciences and sought to
uncover regularities in spatial organization so as
to specify general laws of spatial structure and
urban processes. Their primary interest was locational
analysis, a project facilitated after World
War II by the introduction of computers and the
proliferation of urban data. Such geographic analysis
relied on inferential statistics and theoretical
models such as central place theory, industrial location
theory, urban factorial ecology, and the ranksize
rule. Many in the first generation of American
and British urban geographers point to Harold
Mayer and Clyde Kohn’s Readings in Urban
Geography, published in 1959, as the new field’s
definitive text.
Also important was the seminal article “The
Nature of Cities,” published by geographers
Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in 1945.
Harris and Ullman distinguished between research
related to the internal structure of the city (i.e., the
question of urban form) and that related to external
structure (i.e., urban systems and hierarchies of
settlements). These two aspects of the spatial science
defined the discipline’s basic urban curriculum
for an extended period and still characterize
the approach valued in many geography departments
in the United States and in A level and
GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education)
work in Britain.
Internal Structure of the City
The theoretical framework for much of the early
work in urban geography borrowed from the urban
spatial theory associated with the early-twentiethcentury
University of Chicago. To this day, urban
geography texts often initiate discussion of urban
form, growth, and neighborhood change by reference
to sociologist Ernest Burgess’s concentric zone
model and land economist Homer Hoyt’s sector
model. Introduced in 1925, Burgess’s concentric
zone model emphasized the urban center’s organizing
influence on the city, creating rings radiating out
from the central business district with each successive
residential ring representing greater economic
and social status. Hoyt’s model, introduced in 1939,
critiqued the Burgess model. Hoyt theorized urban
growth as a star-shaped pattern of development
with land use radiating out from the urban center
along transportation corridors. These models of
sociospatial differentiation were challenged later by
the impact of the automobile on urban form. Harris
and Ullman’s multiple-nuclei model represented a
metropolitan area that no longer was defined by
distance from the central business district but
instead consisted of multiple land-use centers. Its
fragmentation emphasized the decentralization and
land-use differentiation allowed by increasing automobility.
All of these models achieved iconic status
in urban geography, and successive generations
have produced variations for heuristic use and occasionally
for theoretical debate.