Search Results

This chapter examines the link between intercity trade and long-run urban growth. It begins by introducing a Ventura-type model of the growth of isolated cities that allows for investment in physical capital and in urban transportation as ways to increase urban productive capacity. It then considers a sample of growth empirics for the United States, European, and Brazilian systems of cities with an emphasis on transportation improvements and factor accumulation. It also describes a model of economic growth in a system of cities that leads to a precise description of the law of motion in dynamic settings of either autarkic cities or specialized cities engaged in intercity trade. Finally, it explores the interrelationships between economic integration, urban specialization, and growth; the Rossi-Hansberg–Wright model of urban structure and its evolution; empirical aspects of urban structure and long-run urban growth; and sequential urban growth and decay.

This chapter outlines the attitude of Ulster Presbyterians to Sabbath attendance and observance, along with the efforts of religious reformers in the 19th century to improve lay practice and deal with the problems caused by population and urban growth.

This book examines the economic dimensions of social interactions, with an eye towards enriching our metaphors for understanding and modeling the fabric of communities, their neighborhoods, and their consequences for studying larger regional and national economies. To this end, the book considers urban externalities that economists and other social scientists see as instances of social interactions, as well as the location decisions of individuals and firms. Focusing on the city, the book also explores urban structure, industrial specialization and diversification, and urban growth in the context of national economic growth. Finally, it discusses new economic geography, an approach that seeks to integrate urban and regional economics, both in a national and an international context.

This chapter asks the question, what does this unthinking mean for current anthropogenic climate change policies? This is answered in two ways. First, the concept of urban demand is discussed in its current manifestation as the product of a global Advertising-Big Data-Social Media complex. Second, the mechanisms behind the immensity of Chinese urban growth in recent decades are described. In their different, but intertwined, ways these two expressions of today’s modernity are pointing irrevocably towards terminal consumption. The only means to stop this happening appears to a reinvention of the city, creating an urban demand for stewarding nature for future generations, a posterity city

This chapter talks about the thousands of Americans, along with immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and a slew of other countries, who contributed to the unprecedented rate of urban growth in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The grounds of the expositions provided a model for a refined and republican urban landscape, and the way that visitors perceived and moved around the fair grounds offered an alternative to existing urban spatial practices. The emergence of new ideas about leisure, pleasure travel, and urban life signaled the reconceptualization of urban space and social relations in ways that made urban tourism possible. In trying to reconcile the contradictions among profit, refinement, republican egalitarianism, and the ideal of separate spheres, trains and hotels both legitimized public leisure and shifted the boundary between public and private spaces and behaviors.

This chapter states that the studies in this volume represent a significant advance in our understanding of urbanization and development. Approaching the problem from a number of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, they shed light on the three questions posed in the introduction to this volume: (i) What is so special about the urban context? (ii) Why is urbanization and urban growth important to development in the current conjuncture? (iii) What are the strengths and limitations of our current state of knowledge about urbanization and development from a policy perspective? Answers to these questions have already been proposed in the introductory chapter. In this epilogue to the volume the last of these three questions are revisited, focusing in particular on the issues outstanding for analysis and research, and it concludes with an answer to the fourth question posed in the introduction: How can a multidisciplinary perspective on the urban context add value to development research and policy?

From the liberation to the end of the Second World War, Bulgaria saw growth without structural change. From 1878 to 1944, a number of traditional practices disappeared, but the fundamental nature of both society and the economy were little altered: Bulgaria remained predominantly rural; its society rested on the village and the family; its agriculture was almost entirely the preserve of the small peasant proprietor; and its exports, at least in times of peace, were dominated by grain. Its industries grew, but they remained closely linked to agriculture, and they continued to be dominated not by large factories but by small workshops that employed only a handful of workers. There was slow but organic change. From 1944 to the early 1990s there was to be rapid but artificial change as socialist planning transformed both society and the economy through the collectivization of the land, rapid urbanization, and the development of a heavy industrial base.

This chapter argues for a ‘smart city’ approach, recycling existing homes and spaces, relying on neighbourhood management and renewal to make existing communities more attractive. It suggests that in order to cope with such immense land, housing, and social pressures, government needs to win people back into cities that are safe, clean, and energy efficient, using less than half the current resources. It explains that smart growth means containing the expansion of cities by creating a fixed urban growth boundary, and intensively regenerating existing neighbourhoods to reverse the flight of people, jobs, and investment into land-gobbling, congestion-generating, and environmentally damaging urban extensions.

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.

This chapter examines the origins of the Sustainable Communities Plan within the divided and unequal cities, challenging the sustainability of the plans for ‘boom and abandonment’, particularly the intense urban growth proposed for the South of the country. It notes that in 2003 the government set out its big-picture of vision of continuing urban growth for England in the Sustainable Communities Plan, a radical attempt to ‘re-balance’ housing supply and demand in all parts of the country. It claims that the progress report presents a mosaic of encouraging dynamism and new thinking, alongside worrying signs of decrepitude and mistakes.

Theories of the urban growth machine have long been a central analytical tool for contemporary research on urban governance. But in what sense are growth machines, in fact, “urban”? To what degree must “the city” serve as the spatial locus for growth machine strategies? To address such questions, this chapter critically evaluates the influential work of urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch on US growth machine dynamics. In contrast to an influential line of critique that reproaches these authors for their putative methodological localism, it is argued that their framework is, in fact, explicitly attuned to the role of interscalar politico-institutional relays in the construction of urban growth machines. These considerations lead to a dynamically multiscalar reading of the national institutional frameworks that have facilitated the formation of growth machines at the urban scale during the course of US territorial development. This analysis has broad methodological implications for the comparative-historical investigation of urban governance.

This chapter aims to provide fundamental information about the factors that influence the urban growth and competitiveness of cities in Great Britain. It describes the sources, nature, and location of economically successful towns and cities, and identifies the long-term winners and losers in the British urban system. The chapter evaluates the impacts of a city's industrial inheritance and specialisation, the types of companies in it, the city's locational characteristics, the quality of its infrastructure, and the capacity of the city to support innovation and learning. The chapter also highlights the importance of public policy in regulating private-sector activities and providing resources to support and renew different elements of a city's portfolio of assets.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the demographic characteristics of port cities in Western Europe and their role in urbanisation during the period from 1650 to 1939. The book describes the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of port-cities, and considers the hypothesis that the demographic profile of a city is a reflection of its function which suggests that different city types can be associated historically with the role of different components in urban population growth. It also discusses the urban social problems in port-cities, particularly in the port transport industry and related secondary-sector activities.

This chapter reexamines the L.A. School’s paradigm of urban growth that challenged the iconic concentric circles model developed in the 1920s by the Chicago School of Sociology. It argues that the L.A. School, like the Chicago School before it, offers an inadequate account of political institutions and the local state as forces shaping urban and metropolitan growth. Many of the L.A. School’s adherents perpetuate a Chinatown myth of the local state, which implies that urban democracy has failed. It also understates the importance of local politics and public entrepreneurship to understanding Los Angeles’s rise as a regional imperium and global city. The chapter presents alternative account of L.A.’s improbable yet rapid twentieth-century growth, focusing on public entrepreneurship and local state capacity and relative autonomy. It suggests that any new urban growth paradigm needs to bring the local state back in.

Why did urban change become a fixation in the wake of the World War One? What caused the “discovery of the city”? Chapter 1 focuses on the question of historical moment, explaining why a discourse on the modern emerged with such peculiar force in teens and twenties. In part the answer lies in the economic boom of World War One, which spurred the rapid growth of Japanese commerce and industry. Its impact was felt primarily at the municipal level, where ballooning populations and a construction boom transformed cityscapes throughout the country. Urban expansion changed the way people thought about the city as a social and economic space. In the new imaginary, cities became sites of explosive growth and instability, symbolized in the conspicuous consumption of the nouveau rich and the collective violence of the working poor.

This chapter presents the civic capacity's role in innovative efforts to manage urban growth in Mumbai in India and Salt Lake City in the United States, exemplars of the distinct problems of uneven urban growth being faced by both developed and developing countries. Both of these cases, which highlight the problems of unsustainable, inefficient, and inequitable urbanization, also exemplify the challenges of civic action in rich and poor democracies. Experts are of the opinion that new civic approaches have been adopted and utilized by both cities in solving problems of urbanization through collective civic action. The chapter also describes a model that can be followed by other cities facing similar problems.