The History of Urban Geography
The field of urban geography is anything but new. Over 8000 years ago cities began to appear around the globe, with the first ones holding only hundreds of people. The region of Mesopotamia in the fertile crescent is considered to be the first urban hearth the world had ever seen. The cities of Ur and Babylon located between the Tigris and Euphrates were founded around 3500 BCE, and it not a coincidence that the wheel was invented at that same time. These ancient cities were both centers of religion and economic nodes. There were many urban hearth proceeding Mesopotamia but the largest city of the ancient world was Tenochtitlan, know today simply as Mexico City. At its peak, over 15 thousand inhabitants lived and worked there. Tons of urban planning went into building in designing the city. First, the Aztecs dumped soil in Lake Texcoco until they created a small artificial island in the middle. They carefully planned their cities to fit their social, economic, and religious structures such as placing emphasis on religious monuments. You may ask yourself how did they have the time and resources to build and maintain these large and dynamic cities. The answer lies in social stratification and agricultural surplus. Social stratification is when a society forms a hierarchy socially, politically, and economically. This is especially prevalent in today's free market system where some people have more money and power than others. Social stratification allows for the division of labor which creates more time for people to innovate and improve. Agricultural surplus is when a society has a surplus of food, and this allows people to break off into different industries that are not agricultural. This is when innovation occurs because engineers, scientists, and social leaders enter the job market. By utilising urban geography to study how these historical processes influenced how people structured and built cities, we can begin to understand how these influenced the way that people consumed, organised social classes, and how they lived day by day.
There are several models that attempt to explain the layout of North American cities, and these models are crucial to understanding the concept of urban geography. They also reflect how cities have changed over the years to both adapt and manage a constantly changing economy and social structure. The first one ever conceived was the Concentric Zone model, designed by sociologist Ernest Burgess in the 1920’s. During his study of Chicago, he noticed that cities were made up of 5 concentric zones, all defined by their functions. There are many limitations to this model, so in the late 1930’s Homer Hoyt came up with the Sector model to address those shortcomings. He focused on residential patterns in the United States, and found that cities grow outwards from the core. He then divided his model into pie shaped sectors to show where certain industries and social classes chose to live. In the 1940’s the CBD began to lose its dominance as the core of the city. Chauncy Harris and Edward Ultman decided to focus on these issues by creating a new model that looked very different from previous ones. In the multiple nuclei model each industry and social class has its own sector that don't focus onto a single nuclei. Harris and Ullman proposed that each sector is a nuclei itself. Although there are other city models, these are the three classical models that illustrate the historical urban geography and layout of North American cities. Through studying these models, we can begin to see how the city structure has changed with society.
Urban geography has been an important topic of study ever since Mesopotamia, but the Industrial Revolution provided a disruptive change in this field of study. The urban morphology (The layout of the city and its physical form and structure) changed dramatically to account for the influx of people from the countryside, and people began to interact with new specialised mechanized machinery. This is known as the Second Urban Revolution. Due to a need for an energy source such as coal, the Urban Geography of cities changed dramatically. The primary concern when locating a new city quickly became the proximity to an energy source, but due to the diffusion of railways even cities not close to coalfields had access to coal. Although the conditions were dismal during this period of time, it was the stepping stone towards today's modern society. Much like the first urban revolution, an agricultural revolution had to occur in order to sustainability relocate people from the country sides, where farms are located. This is where the second agricultural revolution comes into play. The invention of new farming techniques such as fertiliser and improvements of existing ones led to higher yields per parcel of land. This meant less farmers were needed to feed the growing population, thus more people were able to get jobs in the cities as laborers. As time went on municipalities began to enact zoning laws that determined where certain buildings could be located. This again had a dramatic impact on urban morphology and the spatial interactions people had with their surroundings.
