Urban Linkages: America’s Cities

UrbanLinkages:America'sCities John N Ingham JamesBorchert. Alley L1/e in Washington: Famill'.Community. Religion and Folkli/e in rheCin·.1850-1970. Urbana: University of Illinoi~ Press. 1980.326 + xiv pp. DavidR. Goldfield. Urban Growth in the Age of Sec£ionalism: Virginia. 1846-1861. BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press. J977. 336+ XXX pp. JuddKahn. Imperial San Francisco: Politicsand Planning in an American City. 1897-1906. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press. 1979.263 + xii pp. RobertaBalstad Miller. City and Hinterland: A CaseStudy of Urban Growth and Regional De1·elopment. Westport.Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1979.179+ xivpp. AllanPred. Urban Grol\'th and Cit\' S1·tems mthe Unired Staces. 1840-1860. Ca~bridge. Mass: HarvardUniversity Press. 1980.282 + xvii pp. JohnC. Schneider. Detroit and the Problem ol O,de, 1830-1880: A Geography of Crime. Ri;r and Policing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1980.170+ xv pp. Three of these books deal with various aspects of urban growth in America in the period prior to the Civil War. A fourth uses the growth theme as a mechanism to examine politics and planning at the turn of the twentieth century, and the final two deal with what might be termed the social consequences of that growth, i.e. the interrelated problems of crime, order andcommunity building. Looked at in a slightly different way, the first trio of books deals largely with the external relations of a city or group of cities, whilethe final three focus upon the internal relationship, or urban ecology, of their respective cities. Allan Fred's Urban Growth and City Systems is his third volume on nineteenth-century urban growth. His first book in this genre, The Spatial Dynamics of United States Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800-1914 (1966), developed a model that showed urban-size growth as an unbroken circular and cumulative process rather than as a series of discrete stages of change. Further, he posited urbanization and industrialization as interacting spatial processes, helping to develop a new theory of economic location which went beyond traditional accounts. His second book, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840 (1973),argued that the time requirements for physical movement among cities, together with the volume and frequency of contacts, largely governed which places would grow in size and influence. Since his first book focused Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14. Number 2. Summer 1983.175-84 176 John N.Ingham on the period between 1860and 1914,and his second on the period to 1840, the present volume addresses an important gap left in his earlier studies. This period (1840-1860)is particularly important because it witnessed the beginnings of manufacturing breakthroughs in major urban centers and also had the two highest decennial rates of urbanization ever recorded in the United States. Pred, a geographer, has primarily directed attention in his works to a modification of Walter Christaller's central place theory which, in simplest terms, proposed that towns with the lowest level of specialization would be equally spaced and surrounded by hexagonally shaped hinterlands. For every six of these towns, there would be a larger, more specialized city which, in turn, would be situated an equal distance from other cities with the same level of specialization as itself. It would also have a larger hexagonal service area for its own specialized service. Pred's work, including the present book, has challenged the hierarchical simplicity of Christaller·s system, replacing it with a more diffuse (and more vague) system of relationships among a system of cities. For the present book, Pred addresses himself to four major questions: one, how simple or complex were the economic interdependencies of major urban centers during this period? two, how did the economic interdependence interact with the feedback processes that affected population growth within these cities? three, how can these same cities· interdependence be related to the on-going processes of national and regional city-system growth and development? and, finally, why was the major-center rank stability maintained during the two decades before the Civil War? To answer these questions Pred describes and analyzes the flow of selected commodities from Boston, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cincinnati and Charleston, particularly focusing upon...