Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo

Innovation Cycles and Urban Dynamics

Urban systems are adaptive systems, in the sense that they continuously renew their structure while fulfilling very different functionalities. Many examples of adaptation in city size, spacing, and their social and functional components have been given in Chapter 6 of this book. There, we defined the structure of urban systems as a rather persistent configuration of relative and relational properties differentiating cities, which, over long periods, maintains the same cities in categories of size or socio-economic specialization. The content of these categories changes in terms of the quantitative thresholds or the qualitative attributes used for defining them at each date, but they retain the same meaning in terms of the relative situation of cities in the urban systems. Hierarchical differentiation and socio-economic specialization are the major structural features shared by all city systems. On the scale of national, continental, or world urban systems, the structures result mainly from self-organization processes, even if intentional decisions made by individuals or institutions (for instance, the choice of Brussels for the seat of many European Union institutions) may sometimes influence the general configuration.

Multilevel comparison of large urban systems

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit (“city”) and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf’s and Gibrat’s model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.

Knowledge Economy and Competitiveness: Economic Trajectories of French Cities Since the 1960s

The French economy, as well as those of mature industrialized countries, is going through a period of intense change. This period is characterized by two major (and interrelated) trends: (a) a transition from the industrial age to what is more and more commonly referred to as the “age of the knowledge economy” and (b) a redrawing of economic geography at a global scale.

The US Urban System

This chapter documents the historical evolution of the US urban system. From a handful of port cities in the colonial period, there was a sustained urban growth from 1830 to the twentieth century. While the initial rise is associated with a transportation revolution and early industrialization, regional shocks associated with immigration, Second Industrial Revolution, gold and oil discoveries, and land speculation give special character to US urban development. The rank-size analysis of city sizes shows that there were three periods of urban hierarchy, largely coinciding with functional evolutions of cities: first, as regional mercantile centers; second, as national, industrial-mercantile, densely built cities; and, third, as postindustrial, service-oriented, metropolitan, suburban places. A more detailed analysis of postindustrial cities shows that innovations in services such as finance, insurance, and real estate contribute significantly to the concentration of few large metropolitan areas, whereas manufacturing and retail tend toward medium and smaller cities. The larger cities were considerably more economically diverse than smaller cities, and a spatial analysis indicates that cities tend to coevolve as they compete to grow. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the impact of political institutions on urban development. In contrast to developments in Latin America and Canada, American federalism that grants significant political authority to state and localities has significantly impacted US urban and rural development.

The South African Urban System

South Africa is often considered an unusual and extreme case in geography. One difficulty is whether to label this a developing country (like its neighbouring countries), a former colony (like the United States and Australia), or an emerging economy (like the BRICS group), because of its highly diverse and unevenly developed character. South Africa also bears a strong imprint of its colonial and apartheid history, with long-lasting, path-dependent effects. This special status alludes to the complex territorial trends that characterise the country. The heterogeneous settlement dynamics and differentiated social, economic and political systems have exerted a powerful influence over urbanization trends. The chapter explores whether these trends are distinctive compared with other countries, and what specific socioeconomic challenges are faced in the urban areas.