London Urbanisation

10 Key excerpts on "London Urbanisation"

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  Economic and Social Geography

  • 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.

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  Urban World/Global City

  • David Clark(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3Urban growth and urbanisation: historical patterns

  By the end of this chapter you should:

  • be able to distinguish between urban growth, urbanisation and the spread of urbanism;
  • understand the main ways in which urban growth and urbanisation are occurring;
  • be familiar with the concept of counterurbanisation and understand its causes;
  • understand the ways in which the distribution of population in and around cities changes over time;
  • be aware of the major changes which have occurred in the course of global urban development and the reasons for them.

  Introduction

  The present pattern of global urban development is merely the most recent product of processes of urban change that began over 8,000 years ago. It represents an intermediate stage in the progression from a wholly rural to what will possibly be a completely urban world. The global urban pattern is changing in three different and unconnected ways through urban growth, urbanisation and the spread of urbanism. Urban growth occurs when the population of towns and cities rises. Urbanisation refers to the increase in the proportion of the population that lives in towns and cities. Urbanism is the name that is most commonly used to describe the social and behavioural characteristics of urban living that are being extended across society as a whole as people adopt urban values, identities and lifestyles. This chapter and Chapter 4 identify and attempt to identify and account for recent patterns of urban growth and urbanisation at the global scale. The origins and spread of urbanism are the focus of Chapter 6 .

  Urban growth and urbanisation are separate and independent trends. Urban growth refers to the absolute increase in the size of the urban population. It occurs both through natural increase, which is an excess of births over deaths, and through net in-migration. In most cities both factors operate together and reinforce each other, although the relative balance varies from place to place and at different times. Growth rates are compounded when the in-migrants are young adults. These are the most fertile age group and their influx is likely to raise the rate of natural increase. However, if the in-migrants are predominantly of one sex, the accompanying rate of natural increase is likely to be lower. As an actual rather than a percentage figure, urban growth is not subject to any ceiling. It can take place without urbanisation occurring so long as rural growth occurs at the same rate. It is likely to continue after urbanisation has ceased, as the population, which will all be living in urban places, goes on growing through the excess of births over deaths.

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  Regenerating London

  Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City

  • Rob Imrie, Loretta Lees, Mike Raco(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  et al., 2002; Hall, 1989; Thornley, 1992). Likewise, much has been written about the social histories of London, and there are numerous literary accounts of the life and times of London’s population (Ackroyd, 2000; Hall, 2007; Picard, 1997; Porter, 1989; Rasmussen, 1960). This book seeks to build on these contributions by developing the argument that the making of London’s geographies has always been related closely to interventions in, and actions upon, physical spaces in the capital and, as such, much more focus on the topic is warranted.

  In this book we use the term ‘urban regeneration’ as a normative concept that is rooted in British urban policy. It refers to those policies and strategies that have been designed to deal with urban decline, decay and social and economic transformation in London. Urban regeneration implies an integrated perspective on the problems and potentials of cities. Roberts (2000: 17) defines it as a ‘comprehensive and integrated vision and action which leads to the resolution of urban problems and which seeks to bring about a lasting improvement in the economic, physical, social and environmental condition of an area that has been subject to change’. Couch et al. (2003: 2) state that urban regeneration is ‘concerned with the re-growth of economic activity where it has been lost; the restoration of social function where there has been dysfunction, or social inclusion where there has been exclusion; and the restoration of environmental quality or ecological balance where it has been lost’.

  The chapters in the book seek to develop, in a variety of ways, at least three interrelated understandings of urban regeneration in London. First, policy approaches to London’s regeneration have to be understood as part of the capital’s interplay with broader, national state policy programmes and forms of restructuring of welfare provision. In Cochrane’s (2007) terms, urban, spatial, policies and programmes are closely entwined with (national) social policy measures and interventions. Second, the regeneration of London has also to be set, and understood, within the broadcloth of international relations and transnational processes relating to the capital’s position as a global city and as a pre-eminent player in the global economy. Third, while in aggregate terms urban regeneration in London seems to be successful in facilitating economic and cultural regeneration, it is faring much less well in terms of social inclusion and social sustainability, and may well be implicated in contributing to the widening of social and economic inequalities.

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  A Mighty Capital under Threat

  The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000

  • Bill Luckin, Peter Thorsheim, Bill Luckin, Peter Thorsheim(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  The maps also highlight the haphazard nature of suburbanization, with considerable overlap between new dormitory suburbs, pockets of industry, and a few remaining farms. There were significant environmental consequences of this dispersal of the population, industry, and infrastructure across the Greater London region in the twentieth century. The Metropolis is still dotted with toxic decommissioned landfills and brownfields, which are slowly are being redeveloped through very expensive remediation projects. 8 Finally, the roads and buildings that make up Greater London are themselves a low-level environmental problem. Impermeable surfaces and development on the floodplains increased the risk of floods, and this problem will only increase as climate change brings more storms and higher ocean levels. 9 LONDON’S GROWTH Beginning in the late eighteenth century, regions on London’s urban fringe generally developed first into market gardens or dumping sites, with ribbons of development spreading along the main roads. Gradually, the land between the thoroughfares filled in with suburban streets and row houses, or a cluster of factories. 10 This process repeated over time as new regions on the outskirts formed into suburbs, and the older districts became inner suburbs or a part of London. 11 Hackney, for example, transformed from a rural hinterland in 1800 to a growing suburb in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was increasingly absorbed into London proper during the twentieth century. Preexisting towns, villages, and hamlets also transformed into suburbs as London’s sphere of influence and transportation networks expanded. This resulted in satellite suburbs growing in Outer London, beyond the limits of the continuous built-up area

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  Urban Planning and Everyday Urbanisation

  A Case Study on Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

  • Nadine Appelhans(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The UNPDF defines urbanisation as: “The process of transition from a rural to a more urban society. Statistically, urba-nization reflects an increasing proportion of the population living in settlements defined as urban, primarily through net rural to urban migration.” (UNPDF 2007: 6). This quantitative understanding of urbanisation is also reflected in the data informing many urbanisation policies: Referring to the situation on a continental level in Africa, the description of urbanisation is most commonly described as the shift of population proportions from rural districts to urban areas, expressed in a rural-urban population ratio. The description of demographic urbanisation, thus, assesses the contribution of in-migration to the growth of towns by comparing towns’ growth to the national growth rate (cf. Potts 2009: 254). Such a demographic description of urbanisation gives an outline of the general trends of urbanisation on the African continent in figures, but it also contains 25 insufficiencies of a description limited to a rural-urban population ratio and its understandings of the consequences and requirements of the urbanisation pro-cess within the affected areas. These generalisations obscure the fact that there are strong regional, national and local differences in the patterns, speed and also the extent of urban growth across certain regions and between the individual cities (Potts 2009: 254). As described, there are two main reasons for this: insufficient quantitative data, and a lack of qualitative interpretation. The sparse quantitative data situation makes it difficult even to depict the extent of the progress and all prognoses are, therefore, subject to high relativity (Boquier 2004, Rakodi 2002). Currently, demographic data cannot sufficiently provide an answer to the question of reasons for urbanisation.

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  Urban Flood Management

  • Chris Zevenbergen, Adrian Cashman, Niki Evelpidou, Erik Pasche, Stephen Garvin, Richard Ashley(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  63 Urbanisation Learning outcomes In the previous chapters you learned that urbanisation increases the magnitude and frequency of floods in the following ways: l the creation of impervious surfaces such as roofs and pavements, and roads reduces infiltration so that a higher proportion of storm rainfall generates runoff; l hydraulically smooth urban surfaces serviced with a network of surface drains and underground sewers, deliver water more rapidly to the channel; l the natural river channel is often squeezed by the intrusion of bridge supports or riverside facilities, thus reducing its carrying capacity. This increases the frequency with which high flow overtops the embankments. In this chapter you will learn about the following key concepts: l Basic concepts and principles of land-use planning. l Cities have flourished and declined over the centuries but now many are growing at record pace. l Cities exhibit different spatial configurations and patterns of urban growth that may be classified in urban typologies. l Urbanisation increases the magnitude and frequency of flooding but also its impact. l The flooding characteristics and impacts depend on and are closely linked to the spatial configurations and patterns of urban growths, respectively. l Human settlements, including many large cities, are also concentrated near or on coastlines, and a large proportion of global economic productivity derives from coastal areas. 3.1 PRINCIPLES OF LAND-USE PLANNING When travelling across cities, suburbs and countryside, you might ask yourself: “Why is this factory located over here?” or “Why are they building this new suburb left of the highway instead of on the right side?” Historically, much of the development of human-related land use was unplanned. Cities started as small settlements along stra-tegically located areas (e.g. close to fertile land often located in delta areas) based on a loose organisation.

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  Towns and Cities

  Competing for survival

  • Angus McIntosh, Dr Angus Mcintosh(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Population change yet more counter-urbanization?

  The residential populations of all towns and cities are always changing; they may be expanding or contracting, becoming more youthful or ageing, or changing in terms of their socio-economic composition. Over time these changes become reflected in the way towns and cities use their land. As E.F. Schumacher stated in Small is Beautiful: ‘Among material resources, the greatest, unquestionably, is the land. Study how society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.’

  The computerization of demographic information nowadays provides both investors in the private sector, as well as administrators in the public sector, with a useful tool to understand land in urban areas. However, as will be discussed in Chapter 7 , as an aid to more enlightened town planning (or urban management), there is very little evidence that this data has been used successfully in strategic planning.

  Population change

  The last half century has been characterized by a continuing process of counter-urbanization. Generally the larger cities have continued to lose population—a phenomenon which has been common in many mature economies. Between 1961 and 1991, inner London lost more than one million residents, a quite staggering decrease. Manchester and Liverpool have both experienced larger percentage declines, but even combining these two cities together, the number of people who migrated outwards is still less than the decline in the number of residents in inner London.

  Over the same 30-year period, Glasgow has shown the largest decline, a drop of 43%, while Edinburgh has seen nearly a quarter of its population disappear. With the exception of inner London, the statistics show that the real acceleration in urban population decline took place after 1971; only inner London had shown a significant fall in population in the previous decade. Some of the cities in decline since 1961 are listed in Table 2.1

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  Africa's Urban Revolution

  • Doctor Edgar Pieterse, Susan Parnell(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Zed Books

    (Publisher)

  257 14 | Urbanisation as a global historical process: theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa Sean Fox The process of urbanisation has traditionally been understood as a natural by-product of economic development. While there is no doubt that economic expansion in the urban sector can stimulate rural-to-urban migration, hence urbanisation, a strictly economic theory of the process fails to account ad-equately for the phenomenon of ‘urbanisation without growth’ observed in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s (Fay and Opal 2000). Inspired by this apparent anomaly, I propose an alternative, historically grounded theory of urbanisation and deploy it to explain the stylised facts of Africa’s urban transition, namely the late onset of urbanisation vis-à-vis other major, less developed world regions and the persistence of both urbanisation and rapid urban population growth in the late twentieth century despite economic stag-nation (see Table 14.1). Table 14.1 Demographic and economic trends in less developed regions, 1960–2005 1960 1975–2005 Urban Urban Urban- GDP population growth isation growth (%of total) rate rate rate Sub-Saharan Africa 14.8 4.4 1.7 −0.1 East Asia and Pacific 20.5 3.5 2.1 3.1 South Asia 16.7 3.4 1.2 3.7 Middle East and North Africa 35.1 3.6 0.9 1.2 Latin America and Caribbean 48.9 2.8 0.8 1.2 Notes : Gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate estimates are based on real GDP per capita (constant 2000 US$). Throughout this chapter, ‘urban growth rate’ refers to the compound average annual rate of population growth in urban areas; ‘urbanisation rate’ refers to the compound average annual rate of change in the percentage of a country’s population residing in urban as opposed to rural areas. Source : Calculation based on data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators Database, accessed January 2012.

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  Migration and Mobility

  Biosocial Aspects of Human Movement

  • A.J. Boyce(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  INTER-URBAN MIGRATION IN BRITAIN: A GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

  J.H. JOHNSON

  Department of Geography, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA 1 4YW, UK

  INTRODUCTION

  As societies, economies and transport systems become modernized, then more frequent, longer, and more complex movements of population commonly take place. As this spatial mobility of population grows, the resulting diverse movements of population become more and more difficult to fit into an easy typology; but a critical distinction must be made between temporary movements connected with everyday activities and those moves which involve a change of home, with the social and economic costs that this entails (figure 1 ). Not that the two types are independent, since temporary movements provide the opportunity to acquire the information which may lead to permanent migration. For example, retirement moves are often made to resort areas known earlier in life and intra-urban residential moves are frequently made to sectors of the city which are known for other reasons. Focusing on permanent moves (in so far as the term ‘permanent’ can be applied to any population movement in modern urban society), a critical distinction is between those moves which simply involve a change of residence and those which also involve a change in employment (Johnson 1976 ). The study of ‘ labour migration’ – the simultaneous change of job and of home – has taken on greater importance in recent decades for a number of inter-related reasons.

  FIGURE 1

  . Some types of population migration.

  Reduced levels of fertility are leading to parallel falls in natural increase in many parts of the developed world. In Britain, it is likely that the period of relatively rapid population increase since the end of World War II is at last at an end. As a result, population migration of all types is becoming more important in causing changes in population totals and in modifying local population structures. The importance of migration is not merely demographic. In the past many regionally based planning proposals have often assumed that natural increase would more than offset loss by migration. This assumption has usually proved to be true, at least as far as the population totals of major regions are concerned, although not necessarily at a local scale. It could be quite confidently expected that planning errors in the over-provision of houses or jobs could be corrected in the longer term, as total regional population grew. Now, however, mistakes in the allocation of regional investment appear more difficult to adjust (Johnson & Salt 1981

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  Handbook of Urban Studies

  • Ronan Paddison(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  This is a question that is taken up in more depth in other chapters, so suffice it here to say that much depends on the scale of the challenge in terms of differences between cities in the current disparities between their inner and outer areas. Also crucial, given the importance of public funds in underwriting much of the costs of inner renewal in the 1980s and 1990s, is the extent to which housing providers and buyers can be convinced that the appropriate range of private and public services will be available in these areas in the future and that new investment will not be undermined by the further growth of ‘underclass’ neighbourhoods. A final, critical issue is that of densification and urban consolidation, whereby increased house building on empty or derelict land and potential green spaces may lead to increased traffic congestion and less attractive environments for residents, representing a diffi-cult balance to be struck. CONCLUDING COMMENTS If there is one certainty to be drawn from this review of urban population trends, it is that nothing is the same as it was in those apparently straightforward days when ‘urbanization’ meant greater population concentration in any geographical framework used. First, most parts of the developed world have reached the situa-tion where there is little scope for further increases in the proportion of people classified as living in urban places. Secondly, local decen-tralization, while perhaps the most enduring feature of the past few decades, is now very different from the dormitory style sub urbaniza-tion of the early post-war period, now involving the veritable ‘urbanization of the suburbs’ and some withdrawal of ‘urban’ facilities from the traditional cities through a form of ‘deurbaniza-tion’ process.

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