Geography
Internal Structure of Cities
The internal structure of cities refers to the spatial organization and layout of urban areas, including the distribution of land use, infrastructure, and population. It encompasses factors such as zoning, transportation networks, and the arrangement of residential, commercial, and industrial areas within a city. Understanding the internal structure of cities is crucial for urban planning and management.
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10 Key excerpts on "Internal Structure of Cities"
eBook - ePubUrban Geography (Routledge Revivals)
An Introductory Guide
- David Clark(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
6 THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE CITY One of the most characteristic features of modern cities is their high level of internal differentiation. Sets of zones, communities or neighbourhoods are normally distinguishable in terms of physical appearance, population composition and related social characteristics and problems, and these are repeated from one city to another. The existence of similar social and residential patterns suggests that urban structure is determined by a number of general principles of land use and location. It points to the operation of powerful underlying social and economic forces which encourage similar, if not identical, uses for adjacent parcels of land across the city. The identification and explanation of internal patterns and processes is a major topic of inquiry in urban geography. A number of approaches have been followed by urban geographers in their attempts to understand urban spatial structure (Table 6.1). The first is essentially ecological and seeks to account for urban patterning in terms of the struggle for location and space in the city. It places particular emphasis upon compeition over territory between social groups and the ways in which this leads to the emergence of ‘natural’ areas in each centre. The tradeoff approach is grounded in neo-classical economics and explains intra-urban land use patterns in terms of the outcome of competitive bidding for land. Social area analysis and factorial ecology are extensions of the basic ecological approach which interpret intra-urban structures in terms of general theories of social and economic change. The conflict/management approach has roots in political science and the analysis of power and conflict in the city. It investigates the institutional structure of land use and development with reference to the role of urban managers and the nature of the constraints imposed upon individuals and groups within the city
eBook - PDF- Peter McGahan(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Butterworth-Heinemann(Publisher)
Our emphasis, we should note in this and the follow-ing chapter, will be on social ecology - that is, the spatial distribution of population characteristics. Urban spatial structure, broadly understood, also encompasses the distribution of non-residential land uses. Although we shall give some attention as well to the evolution of these, by focusing on population characteristics we can perhaps more directly illustrate the character of the city as a sociospatial system. URBANIZATION AND SPATIAL STRUCTURE In chapter 3 we defined urbanization from an ecological perspective as the development of a complex territorial system of functional relationships. We saw how such factors as transportation promoted this process, and some of the general patterns that emerged. Here we shall concentrate on the spatial correlates of this process - that is, how internal spatial structure of the city reflects its growth. Spatial patterns are indices of underlying functional relationships. The basic principle of urban development is the process of specialization. The emergence of a more extensive territorial division of labour is accompanied by important changes in spatial structure. With urban growth, sub-areas become more specialized and differentiated in terms of population and land-use types. Park's theory of natural areas and McKenzie's concept of eco-logical distribution sought to articulate this process of differentiation; both pointed to the increased sifting and sorting which occurs as urban centres ex-pand. This can be subsumed within a more general theory of increasing scale (Udry 1964; Clignet and Sween 1969), which proposes that as a society 134 S H A P E OF T H E U R B A N S Y S T E M creates large-scale organizational networks and becomes more thoroughly integrated, internal social and spatial differentiation proceeds.
eBook - PDF- R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Made Simple(Publisher)
PART FOUR : SETTLEMENT GEOGRAPHY CHAPTER SEVENTEEN URBANISATION Urban geography constitutes a diverse and rapidly developing field of geographical study. Although settlement studies have long formed a tradi-tional branch of human geography, a great deal of progress has been made in recent years in refining and extending many of the earlier concepts. This growing interest in the geography of towns and cities is probably a reflection of the fact that the majority of the population in the Western World lives in an urban environment, while those who do not are increasingly affected by the decisions, ideas and influences emanating from the main urban centres. Urban geography is concerned with the spatial aspects of cities—then-location, growth, and relationships both one with another and with their surrounding regions. It also embraces the internal patterns of cities in terms of land use, functional areas, and social and cultural patterns. Another approach to the study of towns is what may be termed the ecological approach, which involves consideration of the relationships between the patterns and structure of urban society and the man-made city environment with its various neighbourhoods and districts. A basic aim is the search for recurrent patterns and the formulation of laws and theories. In this respect urban geography has a long tradition of model building, typified by E. W. Burgess's work on the Internal Structure of Cities which dates back to the early 1920s and W. Christaller's work on the location and spacing of settlements which was produced as early as 1933. What is a Town? Before examining some of the main fields of study in urban geography, we must pose the seemingly naïve question: what is a town? In fact the town defies simple definition.
eBook - PDF- Holger Sieg(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Households commute to the his- torical city center not only for work but also for recreation, entertainment, and a variety of other purposes. 418 Internal Structure of Cities FIGURE 22.8. Bike-sharing programs are popular in many cities. (Photo by author) More recently, the trend toward decentralization of employment supported by extensive road and highway networks has been reversed in some metro areas. Revitalized city centers across the nation have started to draw new, younger residents and new businesses. Some cities, such as Rochester, Milwaukee, and Portland, have demolished and replaced some older highways that are expen- sive to maintain, divide urban neighborhoods, and hinder efforts to create pedestrian-friendly spaces. Broadly speaking, the spatial distribution of firms and households determines the commuting patterns and hence infrastructure needs. The spatial structure of cities also depends on transportation technologies and energy prices. For exam- ple, rising energy prices lead to higher commuting and transportation costs. Development of better technologies may partially offset these higher commuting costs. Global warming will have a significant impact on future city structures. There are some plausible scenarios that will require societies to drastically reduce CO 2 emissions. Recall that the average automobile commuter emits ten times as much CO 2 as the average urban commuter who uses public transportation. Approxi- mately 20 percent of all CO 2 emissions is due to household commuting. Another 20 percent is due to residential housing, such as heat and air conditioning. Global warming may, therefore, call for higher-density development, less urban sprawl, and a decreased use of automobiles. Given the importance of cities, one would expect that federal policies would subsidize cities at the expense of their more affluent suburbs. Unfortunately, this 419
eBook - PDF- Paul N. Balchin, David Isaac, Jean Chen(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
3 The Spatial Structure of Urban Areas INTRODUCTION The ability of activities to compete for sites depends upon whether they have the means to benefit from accessibility and complementarity within the urban framework. But economic conditions, population, other land uses both public and private, and the size of the urban area continually change, subjecting the urban land market to forces of perpetual adjustment. The underlying influences upon urban growth are both national and regional. At a national level the size and rate of growth of the gross national product (GNP) per capita determine the quantity and quality of urban land use activity. Yet the less industrialized the country, the greater the poten-tial rate of urbanization, while countries with high GNP per capita may witness a decline in their city centres and an increased rate of suburbanization and decentralization. Nationally, non-economic forces reinforce economic factors. Population growth and migration to urban areas tend ultimately to increase living standards and to lower death-rates. Technological develop-ment similarly raises real incomes and affects the urban land use pattern. For example, improved construction techniques allow the development of taller buildings and new production methods might necessitate larger build-ings on the periphery of cities. Government intervention, even where it is minimal, imposes a national influence over urban growth. But if the gov-ernment is concerned with such issues as the nationalization of development land, the taxing of increased values and strategic planning rather than with merely controlling, say, public health or building standards, the degree of influence is substantial and the economic consequences immense. Regional or local economic, social and political factors may result in some cities growing more rapidly than others.
- Anzhelika Antipova(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2008 ). Other changes in urban structure such as the spatial distribution of activities also result in changes in travel patterns, especially those related to the journey to work. Therefore, studying urban form changes will help to understand changes in travel patterns including commuting.The chapter concludes with an application of the spatial structure model to the contemporary medium-sized metropolitan area in the southern United States with the purpose of investigating the impact of spatial structure (employment locations) upon commuting. The objective of this study is twofold. First, urban form within the medium-sized Baton Rouge MSA region was observed for two time periods, 1990 and 2000, to determine any change in the spatial distribution of employment location. Second, to understand the impact of metropolitan structure on commuter travel, we investigated the commuting patterns under the monocentric and polycentric assumptions. We utilized two measures of the spatial separation between home and work locations including commute time and length. Commute times and lengths will be measured separately for 1990 and 2000 employment centers and compared for both time periods using the t-test of means.4.2 Internal City Structure Models
Early urban models dealt primarily with city structure examining spatial forms or distributions (therefore, the general name of “internal city structure models ”).The early generation of urban models includes concentric zone theory (Burgess 1967 ), sector theory (Hoyt 1939 ), and multi-nuclei theory (Harris and Ullman 1945 ). Urban system modeling, including residential and retail location model by Lowry (1964 ) and Harris and Wilson’s (1978 ) retail model applicable to a wide range of systems of interest, uses the theories from regional science and urban economics to analyze urban structure, development, and decline (Klosterman 1994 ).
eBook - PDF- Ray Hutchison, E. (Earl) Ray Hutchison(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
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 exter-nal structure (i.e., urban systems and hierarchies of settlements). These two aspects of the spatial sci-ence defined the discipline’s basic urban curricu-lum for an extended period and still characterize the approach valued in many geography depart-ments 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-twentieth-century University of Chicago. To this day, urban geography texts often initiate discussion of urban form, growth, and neighborhood change by refer-ence 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 organiz-ing influence on the city, creating rings radiating out from the central business district with each succes-sive 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.
eBook - PDFAfrica's Geography
Dynamics of Place, Cultures, and Economies
- Benjamin Ofori-Amoah(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Example is Johannesburg’s Vision 2030 as world class African City (Sihlongonyane, 2016). The combination of these forces has transformed the spa- tial and the social structures of Africa’s postcolonial or contemporary city so much so that it is important to devote more time to examine these features. The Internal Structure of Africa’s Cities Spatial Structure There is no one model of the spatial structure of Africa’s postcolonial city. However, if we use major land use as proxy, we can discuss the spatial structure of the postcolo- nial city in terms of its commercial, government, industrial, residential, transporta- tion, and open land areas. Commercial areas These areas include the expansion of the old commercial core (CBD) of the colonial city with expatriate department stores and the central markets of the traditional type, as well as the new CBDs made possible by liberaliza- tion policies and foreign direct investments. In Accra (Ghana), for example, Grant and Yankson (2003) reported the emergence of three CBDs. The first is the local CBD, which is the old colonial core, which now caters to the local population. The second is the national CBD that extends from the old core, which caters to the national economy, and the third is the global CBD, which anchors the offices of for- eign companies and caters to the global market. Otiso and Owusu (2008) reported of a second CBD development in Nairobi, Kenya. Commercial activities however, are not restricted only to these cores, but they are also found along all the major arterial roads and streets leading to the main residential areas of the city, merging into local open markets of such areas, and spill- ing over to even residential areas. In recent years, a number of large supermarkets (Shoprite) and modern malls have been added to these commercial areas. The predominant activity in these areas is retailing and street vending, which is almost ubiquitous.
eBook - PDF- Melvin M. Webber(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
An Approach to Metropolitan Spatial Structure 43 ing so that the logical steps may be susceptible to research check. We are particularly impressed with the utility of clearly distinguishing between physical and spatial. This prevents two possible misconceptions. First, it reminds planners and scholars that often when they say physical they may mean spatial. The phrase physical arrangement sometimes re-fers to spatial arrangement. The physical planner in a real sense is a space planner; i.e., he plans how we might best arrange our environment and our activities in space. Second, it reminds us that components of urban structure other than the physical also have a spatial aspect. This may be true of functional organization and even normative structure. Often, when we speak of spatial pattern as if we were referring to the physical environmental setting, we may really be referring to the spatial patterns of the activities and of interpersonal re-lationships. The scheme emphasizes that supporting research and plan-ning are called for to supplement the physical planner's own efforts. The thorough study of the diverse systems and sub-systems of activities within metropolitan areas requires the collaboration of varied social scientists and managerial and professional personnel. Too, complementary types of planning are clearly needed: program or activities planning, social plan-ning, economic planning. By whatever terms and breakdown, planning responsible for the kinds, relative volumes, and or-ganization of the activities to be conducted is called for to supplement and, logically, to precede physical planning. What is currendy confusing is that the physical planners seek reason-ably to bound their own scope, and yet know that, willy-nilly, they are assuming broad responsibilities for the kinds of activi-ties and the patterns of social contacts facilitated by their physical designs.
eBook - PDF- Dave H. Kaplan, Steven Holloway(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
The structure of urban systems and the Internal Structure of Cities are understood to both reflect and constitute the political economy of cities. Substantively, urban political economy has devoted considerable attention to the rise of economic glob- alization and to the changing relationship between governments and urban economies as affected by neoliberal political ideology. Many urban geogra- phers working in the political economy tradition do not espouse strongly structural perspectives and produce work that is sympathetic with several poststructural streams of research, discussed below. Critical Social Theory in Urban Geography The late 1970s and the 1980s witnessed the devel- opment and incorporation of a variety of critical social theory into human geography in general and urban geography in particular. Social theorists take on a critical political perspective, “dedicated to changing the world in some way for the better. Social theory is almost always leftist in style, character, and intent—that is, dedicated to human emancipation” (Peet, 1998, p. 7). Social theorists rejected the notion that spatial relations—distance, rate of diffusion, intervening places—determined such social activi- ties as commuting and migration; rather, they argued that social relations explained the observed spatial or geographic distributions or patterns identified on maps. The “human agency” or social context and power relationships must be uncovered and under- stood before we can comprehend spatial attributes. All human reality is “socially constructed,” that is, created by humans. Feminist Urban Geography Gender studies and feminist theory entered mean- ingfully into geographic research in the 1970s. This stream of work fell into three of the four epistemolog- ical approaches.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
