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The complex social and administrative fabric of Anglo-Saxon England existed largely without urban environments. Based upon patterns of naming, this chapter examines relationships between local administrative districts (hundreds) and central places, arguing for the long-term persistence of pre-urban modes of social organisation in Anglo-Saxon England. Following a review of urban development in Anglo-Saxon England, neglected material is brought to bear on long-standing notions of urbanism which emphasise the progressive nucleation of social and administrative functions as a linear measure of social complexity. A new perspective is offered here which emphasises the limited extent of urban development in England before the 12th century and the robust nature of non-urban social complexity as a social system. Overall, the applicability of measures of social and administrative complexity drawn from ‘primary’ complex societies is questioned and a plea is made for approaching European post-Roman societies on their own terms rather than by comparison with ancient and classical ones.

Extended parental care is found among diverse crustacean species from aquatic and terrestrial environments, and in most cases care is provided exclusively by the females. The observations reviewed herein demonstrate that family members show specific social behaviors (defense, shepherding, grooming, food-sharing) while cohabiting. Advanced social behavior, where parents and offspring cooperate, have only been reported from snapping shrimp, bromeliad crabs, and desert isopods, all of which inhabit long-lived family dwellings. Prolonged cohabitation of parents and sexually maturing offspring is rare among crustaceans, most likely because resources become limiting, are difficult to replenish, and because family members are unable to defend stable dwellings. The presence of a stable dwelling and central place behavior around this dwelling may have been important steps during social evolution. Extended parental care, iteroparous reproduction, and possession of an effective defense mechanism seem to be crucial preadaptations for the evolution of eusocial behavior in crustaceans.

The discussion in this chapter begins with an analysis of central trading places, which looks at the economics of securities trading and the rationale for brokers and central trading places (with reference to US stock exchanges), the types of orders buyers or sellers may place in the market and the way these are executed, and the system of ‘specialists’ commonly found in stock exchanges (which is designed to provide a smooth and continuous market for individual stocks). Next, it briefly examines financial markets without central trading places. This is followed by a look at the mechanics of securities trading in the stock exchanges in London (UK) and Tokyo (Japan). The last section of the chapter discusses the operational efficiency of the stock market and the efficient market hypothesis (EFM), looking at the implications of central exchanges in which information flows rapidly between participants for the efficiency of the stock market as a whole and, in particular, at the ‘random walk’ behavior of share prices.

This chapter examines the urban system of Roman Asia. The distribution of urban sites indicates that a large proportion of Roman Asia was surveyed and controlled by urban centres, fairly evenly distributed across relief, but not across space, becoming sparser in the central plateau and east. The dense clustering of cities seems to reduce the span of control of individual cities within the region considerably, resulting in an average intercity distance of 24.5 km. Supporting this is a far denser network of agricultural sites. This arrangement seems to tally reasonably precisely with central place theory, since sites seem to have functioned as nodes of control (military and political) and as centres of administration and justice, as well as service centres.

In many habitats, the first animal that a visitor is likely to notice is an ant forager. Ants are model systems for the study of foraging strategies, and have stimulated the development of theories in optimal foraging, central place foraging, risk and robustness, and search algorithms. Differences in diet, as well as differences in habitat structure, competitive environment, and colony size have likely led to the broad diversity of foraging and defence strategies in ants. Many factors affect foraging behaviour at the individual and colony levels, including energy requirements, distance to food resources, and avoidance of mortality. As a taxon, ants employ a range of strategies including morphological, chemical, and behavioural defences during foraging to defend both themselves and any resources they are handling.

This introductory chapter begins by explaining what the book is about. It then goes on to define financial markets and financial instruments, and to outline the basic concepts of accounting – the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, and the income statement. The book is mostly concerned with financial markets in the narrow historical sense of a market as central trading place (e.g., stock exchanges and the futures market); other important financial markets, notably those in government bonds, foreign currencies, and over‐the‐counter stocks, are also included since although they do not have central trading places, they share many of the features of markets in the narrow sense. Financial instruments are defined as readily negotiable claims, and include bonds, shares, futures contracts, and options; since futures and options differ in essential ways from securities – equities (shares or stocks), bonds, and other similar financial instruments – and are traded in different markets, they are called ‘derived financial instruments’, or ‘derivatives’.

Historically, urbanization has been characterized by population density, durable built environments, governance, specialized economic activities, urban infrastructures, and their rural spheres of influence. This chapter highlights major contemporary patterns, trends, processes, and theories related to these dimensions, with special attention to the relation of central places to surrounding rural areas. Definitional issues related to the different dimensions of urban settlements and contemporary urban patterns are discussed. Theories and policies corresponding to these major characteristics of urban patterns and urbanization processes are presented, beginning with a brief overview of economic spatial theories. Focus is given to central place theory, where cities are conceptualized as central market places providing goods and services to lower-order cities and their rural hinterlands in exchange for food and materials. The impact of advances in technology and infrastructures on global trade connections is discussed, and insights from Castells’ network society are highlighted. Empirical evidence of two urban policies—the compact city model and urban growth management—are reviewed for their connections to central place theory. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

Hitler’s project was fundamentally geographical, with space, place and landscape pressed into horrific service. Consequently, the Nazis managed, planned, organized and contorted geography. Partly this was achieved by the Nazis drawing on academic labor, that of geographers, urban and rural planners, landscape architects, and agronomists. Each of these academic specialties possessed expert knowledge about geography, as well as theories, concepts and practical methods that could be used to meet the purposes of National Socialism. Some have argued that such German academics served the Nazi regime willingly and enthusiastically, with no resistance. This paper suggests that was not true. It argues that there was a range of responses by German academics with geographical expertise that varied from enthusiastic support to opposition and subversion. As well there were a range of motivations. The argument is made by drawing especially on the lives and works of two contemporaneous German academics with expert geographical knowledge, Walter Christaller (1893-1969) and August Lösch (1906-1945), but who each had a very different relationship with the Nazis. On the surface, Christaller was a Nazi collaborator, and Lösch was a Nazi resistor. Such a judgment is too simple, however. The reality, the paper suggests, is less starkly black and white than shades of grey.

The earliest ventures in applied geography and area research were developed during the Weimar Republic. In 1933 the first theoretical study appeared: the central place theory by Walter Christaller. Under National Socialism good research conditions existed for social scientists (at least, those who were not persecuted, exiled, or murdered) who wanted to implement their theories. Law and central planning organizations provided the political and institutional basis for scientific research. Power struggles and conflicts concerning competence between different institutions headed by Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg afforded scientists freedom to develop new approaches and conduct research within the control imposed by a central organization. Walter Christaller worked in such institutions under Himmler. His personal and political biography is imbued with paradoxes: a former member of the Social Democratic Party, he switched to the Nazi Party in 1940, in 1945 to the Communist Party, and once again to the Social Democratic Party in 1959. However, these events merely hint at the complex nature of the political context in which Christaller and other scientists worked from 1933 to 1945. This chapter is an attempt to illuminate the ‘reactionary modernism’ of the Nazi State, drawing from archival material and recent historical studies on social science in the 1930s and 1940s.

This chapter analyzes the high-stakes of the Gaokao, which, together with its undetermined outcome, forms a pillar of its fatefulness. It talks about how people see the exam as something consequential since it enables them to migrate from rural to urban places, expanding their capacity to realize important life projects like marriage, childbirth, and eldercare. It also emphasizes the value to people of the migration from rural to urban living, which relates intimately to how they perceive it as a journey toward modernity and national development. The chapter refers to the central-place theory that models China's complex system of interconnected, hierarchically nested regions and markets and corresponds closely with people's native understanding of place. It recounts how urban hierarchy assumed its current form after the commercial revolution of the Tang-Song transition in the ninth to thirteenth centuries.

This chapter will test the model of complexity, while rendering it more concrete. It proposes a deeper study of the evolution of three capitals, encompassing their processes of choice as well as their subsequent evolution. The first, Columbus, Ohio, belongs to the category of capitals undergoing a contemporary metropolization process. It is also a new town built in the wilderness to be capital that grew to become one of the leading cities in its state. The second case, Des Moines, Iowa, is the central place of a mostly rural area that became its state’s leading city while remaining medium-sized. The last case, Frankfort, is an example of the small capital cities without hope of important growth and has never succeeded in rivaling the metropolises of Kentucky.

Foraging is the set of processes by which organisms acquire energy and nutrients, whether the food is directly consumed (feeding), stored for later consumption (hoarding), or given to other individuals (provisioning). Foraging behavior plays an important role in evolutionary biology, not only because it is a major determinant of the survival, growth, and reproductive success of foragers but also because of its impact on predator avoidance, pollination, and dispersal adaptations of potential food organisms. From a contemporary perspective, it is surprising how generally the fundamental role of behavior was neglected in early-20th-century studies of evolution and ecology. Following the development of quantitative techniques and field-oriented approaches by European ethologists, however, interest in foraging, along with other aspects of behavior grew rapidly. Most of this research has sought to describe, explain, and predict foraging behavior quantitatively. The development of an a priori predictive approach using optimality theory, in particular, has revealed a richness and complexity in the patterns of foraging that could not have been imagined only a few decades ago. My goal in this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the main issues in foraging behavior and the logical basis of current approaches. I wish to highlight the successes and potential value of these approaches, while recognizing the gaps and challenges for future research. Contemporary studies of foraging by evolutionary ecologists are based on the synthesis of two research traditions, both emerging during the 1960s. The ethological approach to behavior is illustrated by the research of K. von Frisch and his associates on honeybee foraging and N. Tinbergen and his group on searching behavior of birds. The ethologists’ recognition of behavior as an evolved phenotype, their emphasis on its ecological context, and their careful quantitative and experimental fieldwork set the stage for behavioral ecology (Curio 1976). They classified the behavioral components of foraging, an important contribution to much of the ecological work that followed, and identified a number of widespread characteristics such as localized search following the discovery of a prey (“area-restricted search”) and enhanced detection following experience of a particular prey type (“search image”). The theoretical approach to population ecology was foreshadowed by the Russian V. S. Ivlev.

Drawing on symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, the final chapter reexamines the biomedicalization of memory loss and sociological illness narratives. Since there is nothing intrinsic to the feelings expressed by these respondents that necessarily and inevitably leads to a definition of forgetfulness as a disease, the chapter contemplates how our current preoccupation with memory loss and its construction as a medical problem shape experiences of Alzheimer’s, the values of society members not directly affected by the condition, and our overarching cultural views on aging. Given the central place of memory in the lives of (many) Americans in modern times, this book asks readers to consider whether or not memory loss being seen primarily (or exclusively) as a medical problem is good for seniors (with or without reports of memory loss), is good for any of us as we ourselves are aging, and is good for society at large.

In this chapter three major concepts relating animal population dynamics to landscape change mediated by animal mobility are outlined: meta-population/community dynamics (affecting many habitat specialists), spillover (affecting e.g. ground-living predators), and landscape complementation (affecting e.g. central-place foragers). It is shown that all three concepts contribute to current understanding of animal population dynamics in production landscapes, and that animals differ fundamentally in the extent to which the concepts are applicable. Therefore, it is argued that general recipes such as ‘reduce fragmentation’, ‘increase connectivity’, or ‘increase ecological heterogeneity’ may not provide a universal solution for conserving animals in contemporary agricultural landscapes. In addition, although animal movement studies have contributed to the understanding of biodiversity conservation in farmland, current knowledge about animal mobility is still limited. Thus research based on emerging methods such as landscape genetics or novel methods of tracking small animals is essential for increasing basic understanding of animal mobility.

Chapter 1 is in part autobiographical and invites the reader on four urban journeys. First, we go to New York, whose decline and subsequent resurgence are recounted through the author’s eyes: In this journey, we revisit the violent neighborhoods of 1950s Westside Manhattan, and we also show how New York’s unequaled concentration of human and institutional resources allowed the city to rebound. We then travel to Vienna, which went from imperial grandeur to urban hell, losing its intellectual elites and historic hinterland, only to rise up again. The voyage to Port au Prince follows, introducing us to a Third World city and the struggles of daily life under conditions of extreme poverty and institutional dysfunction, whose roots take us back to Haiti’s sad history. The final stop is Buenos Aires, which was once in the same league with New York and London but is now reduced to the status of a Third World city, providing the textbook example of the power of national government to undermine even the greatest cities.

We analyse how and why Central Places come to dominate particular markets for goods and services. Goods, labour, skills and data all move in different ways and at different speeds through the networks, with different ‘ranges’: critical in determining how much centrality matters in each sector. This connects to the challenges of risk and uncertainty, and to the patterns of search and signalling which firms and their people deploy in different types of market: vital for the ‘opaque’ markets in the most dynamic sectors of the 21^st century economy, where data on its own will not be enough, and where judgement and confidence are crucial. The chapter then homes in on the relationships between access to information, signalling and proximity in helping to acquire certainty and reduce risk. The density of the information ‘surface’ is why cities are so often the key locus of rare skills, of sites for the exchange of complex information, and of high-value markets.

We draw together the book’s themes. These revolve round the core importance of human contact, with face-to-face ever more important, not less, because when insight and knowledge matter F2F will always have the edge. This is despite the ever-deeper penetration of ICT, which allows more choice, accelerates change and enables unparalleled contact, but doesn’t replace face-to face. The pandemic ran a full-strength test of what an e-only work world could be like. The experience will cement and accelerate certain tendencies that already existed, but will not create fundamentally new ones. The long-run strength of central places is because ‘cities are about uncertainty’ and their offer of proximity, of the ‘buzz’, and of confidence is vital. The potential is great: ‘being there’ is still at the core of the urban experience, and face-to-face contact is what towns and cities do for a living.