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-^SOUTHEASTERN GEOGRAPHER Volume II1962 SOME GEOGRAPHIC FEATURES OF THE URBAN FRINGE Malone Young East Tennessee State College There was a time when all land use was rural. It was only when civilization had advanced so people could produce and store a surplus of food that ubanization began. Ancient cities were small; as the productivity of goods increased and transport modes improved, urban growth gained momentum. Ancient and medieval cities were compact, and were commonly separated from the adjacent rural land by walls or moats. When they began to spill over on the adjoining land their nicely delineated boundaries disintegrated. Improved means of transportation, first the locomotive and then the automobile helped expand the economic base and lengthen the commuter distance until the phenomenon known as "urban sprawl" developed. A third division of the landscape, suburbia or the urban fringe, evolved. The urban fringe may be identified as the transitional land between a city and its surrounding rural region. The area is not a geographic entity per se because it possesses both features inherent on its rural origin and the qualities acquired from the urban node. An urban fringe is a sort of "never-never, ever-ever" land (half fish-half fowl). The dualistic nature of the area prevails in the sense that it is more urbanized than might be considered legitimately rural and yet insufficiently structured to qualify as urban. Because of its transitory morphology and dichotomous nature the urban fringe should be divided into workable parts if one wishes to study it more intensively than would suffice for a cursory analysis. Since this area has many features peculiar to the city the techniques used in urban studies may also be applicable to it, especially those involving growth characteristics and socio-economic conditions. Similarly, some of the established methods for analyzing rural land use relationships and differentiations may be adaptable to parts of the urban fringe. The very definition or areal delimitation of the urban fringe inevitably presents a problem. Corporate boundaries have lost significance as a delineating criterion except for certain administrative and statistical purposes. In few places do the geomatical and political boundaries of a given city coincide. The problem of boundary location between urban and rural land is acknowledged by governmental agencies, land economists and geographers. Such diverse criteria as population density, use of municipal utilités, newspaper circulation, commuter status and accessibility have been used for determining various rural-urban relationships. A feasible plan for separating the urban fringe from its urban and rural adjacencies might be by the simple process of fixing its inner and outer boundaries according to the percentage of urbanization relative to the total area. The degree to which the land is developed might serve as a basis in the same manner as population density has been used. If division were based on land use intensity as measured by percentage of urbanization the next step would involve an arbitrary establishment of a maximum and minumum determinate for the continuum. The space to be delineated would then extend from the maximum to the minimum determinates. The urban fringe would thus extend from the point near the edge of the city where the percentage of structural land comprises the established maximum outward to the point of the minumum determinate — (example: 80 percent to 10 percent). The boundaries would thus be mathematically established in a manner similar to that used for fixing isoplethic lines. The outer boundary of the urban fringe is more difficult to establish than the inner one on the rim of the parent city. In the outer fringe the proportion of rural land is higher and the settlement clusters tend to be more widely scattered. The volatile nature of the space involved causes boundaries that are mathematically fixed to become obsolete as land use intensification and structuring continue. If urbanization maintains its rapid pace and the centrifugal forces continue, much of the land that is now rural or suburban will become fully urban and the persistent fringe will advance farther into the "country." The coelescents that tie the urban fringe to its adjacencies are so delicate that the least variable can work profound change in the composite pattern. In a study by...

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