Urbanization

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Urbanization
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Urbanization

• Definition
• Growth and diffusion of city landscapes and urban
  lifestyle
• Can be difficult to define what a city is and
  number of people needed to classify it
• Most MDCs are highly urbanized
• Number and of urban dwellers in LDCs has
  exploded in recent years
• Many city governments are trying to manage
  explosive urbanization
• 10 million a year die from overcrowding and
  inadequate infrastructure

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Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs)

• MSA a term used by the U.S. Census Bureau to
  identify a geographic unit of area including
  central city and all of its immediately
  interacting counties with commuters and people
  directly connected to the central city

• An MSA is an urbanized region with a minimum of
  50,000 people in it
• Often MSA boundaries overlap
• Example The Triangle N.C.
• Urban blobs led to coining of term
  megalopolis
• Originally used to describing fusing of
  Washington, D.C. and Boston
• Also uses a unit called a micropolitan
  statistical area
• Area of the surrounding counties integrated into
  a central city with a population of 10,000 to
  50,000
• Many formerly rural areas now reclassified

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Rate vs. Level of Urbanization

• Rate of urbanization
• Definition
• Speed at which the population is becoming urban
• Level of urbanization
• Definition
• Is the of people already considered urban
• Level of urbanization in the U.S. is nearly 75
• That means nearly 75 of U.S. population lives in
  urban places
• HOWEVER rate of urbanization much higher in China
• Versus its overall lower level of urbanization

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Where Urbanization Began

• Geographers analyze where urbanization 1st
  developed and why urbanization because in these
  urban hearths
• Geographers analyze the path of urbanizations
  diffusion from these hearths and related gaps in
  urban development among different countries
• Several qualities are common among places that
  were urban hearths
• A dependable water supply, a long growing season,
  domesticated plants and animals, plenty of
  building materials, and a system of writing
  records

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Where Urbanization Began

• Agricultural Urban Hearths
• Earliest cities were born around 3500 B.C.E.
• Came from agricultural villages
• Earliest urban hearths existed in
• Mesopotamia
• Indus River
• Nile Valley
• China
• Mexico, Peru

• Trade-Based Urban Hearths
• Some cities grew as established marketplaces
  where traders came together to buy and sell goods
  from across the region
• Urbanism spread westward throughout the
  Mediterranean region and spread eastward through
  overland and caravan routes through Persia into
  India, China, and then Japan
• Specialization began to occur as certain cities
  began to focus on economic development on the
  goods over which they had a comparative advantage

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Where Urbanization Began

• Greco-Roman Urban Hearths
• Greeks and Romans erected cities as centers of
  political and administrative control over their
  conquered regions
• Cities were planned
• Religious Urban Hearths
• Some cities grew as centers of religious ceremony
  that were determined to be holy by sites

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Pre-Industrial Cities

• Definition
• Those that are developed prior to
  industrialization and shared several
  characteristics
• Rural settlements surrounding the urban space
  provided agricultural products to urban dwellers,
  who in turn provided different economic functions
• Cities served as trade centers and gateways to
  foreign lands and markets
• After fall of Roman Empire, pre-industrial cities
  experienced a decline in development

• Pre-Industrial Colonial Cities
• Definition
• Cities built and developed by colonizers in
  conquered lands
• European imperialism fueled creation
• Shared common characteristics
• Wide boulevards
• Classical architecture
• Constructed with the aim of exporting raw
  materials back to the mother country

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Pre-industrial cities

• The urban-banana
• By the beginning of the 1500s, a majority of
  cities were located in trade centers that
  extended from London to Tokyo
• Made a crescent shape , urban banana
• Included
• London, Paris, Constantinople, Venice, Cairo,
  Nanking, Hanchow, and Osaka
• The urban banana resulted from both site and
  situation factors

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Pre-Industrial Cities

• Internal Economic Structure of Pre-Industrial
  Cities
• Often had a diverse mix of economic functions in
  any given space
• Rather than zoning that came with
  industrialization
• Shops, markets, homes, and government often
  jumbled together in urban space
• Still separated by wealth
• In feudal European cities
• Guilds led to clumping of certain functions in
  particular areas of town

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Industrialization and City Structure

• Urban-Industrial Revolution
• In 1800, only 5 of worlds population lived in
  cities
• Diffusion of industrialization is largely
  responsible for urbanizing the worlds people
• Not equal distribution
• European Industrial Revolution
• related to Imperialism
• Triggered diffusion of city growth
• Urbanization grew in a snowball process
• Growth of factories and urban jobs attracted
  rural farm workers
• Started in England
• Created a steady rural-urban migration pattern
• Englands urban population was 24 in 1800, 99
  by 1999

• The 2nd Agriculture Revolution
• Supported the pattern of industrial and urban
  growth
• More efficient and productive agricultural
  practices developed
• Led to more workers moving to cities for jobs
• Improved food supplies also supported an
  increasing population

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Industrialization and City Structure

• The Industrial City
• By mid-1700s formerly great land-based cities
  were fading away
• Sea-trade centers were growing rapidly
• St. Petersburg, Russia
• By the early 1900s, most of the worlds great
  cities were American or European industrial
  cities
• Manchester, England Chicago, Illinois
  Barcelona, Spain
• Industrial cities had a different function from
  the pre-industrial city
• Rather than serve mainly as administrative,
  religious, trade, or gateway cities primary
  function was to make and distribute manufactured
  products

• Shock Cities
• The pattern of rapid urban growth and urban
  migration led to growing urban spaces that were
  overwhelmed with the influx of urban in-migrants
• Definition
• Urban places experiencing infrastructural
  challenges related to massive and rapid
  urbanization
• Challenges often include
• Slums, hazardous pollution levels, deadly fires,
  urban prostitution, and exploitation of children
• Examples
• Manchester, England
• Less than 80,000 in 1750
• 500,000 by 1850
• Chicago, Illinois
• 30,000 in 1750
• 500,000 by 1830
• 1.5 million by 1900

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Industrialization and City Structure

• Strained Infrastructure
• An important trend in modern urbanization is its
  diffusion to LDCs
• Currently highest rates of urbanization are
  occurring in LDCs
• Urbanization in LDCs is often focused on one or
  two major cities with a high degree of primacy
  rather than being spread out throughout the
  country
• Such intensely high rates of urbanization in LDCs
  are straining the infrastructural resources
• Large migration streams of young adults moving
  from rural areas to urban areas add to strain

• Squatter Settlements
• Many migrants are unable to find housing and
  build squatter settlements
• United Nations estimated that 175 million people
  lived in squatter settlements in 2003
• Definition
• Makeshift, un-safe housing constructed from any
  scraps they find on the land they neither rent
  nor own
• Called favelas or barriadas in Latin America,
  bastees in India, kampongs in Malaysia

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Urban Systems

• Defining urban systems
• All urban places are part of an interlocking
  urban system of cities that operate within a
  network of spatial interaction
• A.k.a- urban places interact with each other and
  are interdependent
• Geographers analyze the spatial distribution of
  cities and try to determine why cities look the
  way they do

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Central Place Theory

• Walter Christallers theory
• Developed the theory as a means of studying the
  geographical patterns of urban land use
• Specifically looking to explain and predict the
  pattern of urban places across the map
• Assumptions
• Flat land surface
• Uniformly distributed rural population
• Equal transportation methods
• Evolutionary movement towards the growth of
  cities

• Main ideas
• Central places are urban centers that provide
  services to their surrounding rural people
• Also called hinterland
• Range, Threshold
• Spatial competition implies that central places
  compete with one another for customers
• Illustrates that higher-order central places
  contain economic functions with high thresholds
  and high ranges that require large populations

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Central Place Theory

• Hexagonal Spatial Pattern
• Model predicted hexagonal pattern of urban,
  central places
• Central places vary in their degree of economic
  reach
• Higher-order central places have larger ranges
  and thresholds
• lower-order central places have smaller ranges
  and thresholds

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Urban Hierarchy

• Central place theory predicts that if a
  population is evenly distributed, there will be a
  hierarchy of evenly spread central places to
  serve the population
• Urban hierarchy
• Definition
• System of cities consisting of various levels,
  with a few cities at the top level and
  increasingly more settlements on each lower level
• The position of a city within the hierarchy is
  determined by the types of central place
  functions it provides
• Higher the position in the hierarchy the higher
  the population being served by the central place
  and the more variety of central place functions
  performed in the city
• A.k.a- have the highest ranges and thresholds

• Hierarchy
• There are few urban central places are the top of
  the hierarchy
• Example Chicago

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Applying Central Place Theory and Urban
Hierarchy An Example

• Central place theory provides one piece in the
  jigsaw of understanding and predicting geographic
  patterns or urban places
• Over past thirty years, populations in the U.S.
  south and west have increased and become
  wealthier overall
• With more people and wealth, more services were
  needed
• Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas moved up on the
  urban hierarchy as they grew to offer more
  central place functions to the newly growing
  populations

• As these cities moved up the ladder, other cities
  took their place and others fell
• Tampa, San Antonio, Charlotte moved up
• Cities from Northeast and Midwest fell in
  rankings
• Ex. Cleveland, Detroit

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Rank-Size Rule/ Primate Cities

• There is a relationship between a citys
  population size and its place on the urban
  hierarchy within its urban system
• In MDCs usually predicted using rank-size rule
• Some urban systems have disproportionately large
  cities, called primate cities
• ex Bueno Aires, Argentina is nearly 10x the size
  of the 2nd-largest city
• high degree of primacy

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World Cities

• In the interlocking, interacting network of
  cities throughout the worlds urban system, there
  exist some world cities
• Powerful cities that control a disproportionately
  high level of the worlds economic, political,
  and cultural activities
• Sometimes called global cities

• Distribution
• Group of world cities have shifted
• 1600s- London, Amsterdam, Lisbon
• 1700s- Rome, Paris
• 1800s- Berlin, Chicago, New York City, St.
  Petersburg
• Today world cities are centers of global
  financial decisions, flows of information, and
  TNCs
• NYC, Tokyo, London
• Pan-regional Influence
• Definition
• A reach that extends beyond the citys own region
  into other centers of economic control

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Megacities

• All megacities are large and have over 10 million
  inhabitants
• Examples
• Beijing, Cairo, Mexico City, Jakarta