Michael P. Conzen

Comparing Traditional Urban Form in China and Europe: A Fringe-Belt Approach

Urban growth and transformation across the world are presenting great challenges for the comprehension and management of urban landscape change. Comparative urban morphology makes it possible to identify urban forms common to different geographical regions, while helping to distinguish unique historical characteristics and developments important for towns and cities in the hunt for place identity and prestige. The fringe-belt concept provides a frame of reference for depicting, explaining, and comparing the physical structure and historical development of urban landscapes. The walled cities of Pingyao, China and Como, Italy possess well-preserved historical urban environments that reflect the urban development traditions of their respective cultures. Newly available cartographic evidence and field work reveal critical differences between the embedded fringe belts of the two cities resulting from different historico-geographical dynamics. Pingyaos single composite fringe belt and Comos three distinct belts challenge current understanding of urban structural processes and argue for more focused urban landscape management.

Geographical structure in nineteenth-century urban retailing: Milwaukee, 1836–1890

Abstract This study explores the spatial structure of retailing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the era before the introduction of the electric streetcar in 1890. It uses city directory listings to chart changes in the numbers and types of retail outlets, their degree of nucleation and the functional complexity of such nucleations. The evidence suggests the early appearance of non-central retailing, the rapid dispersal of high as well as low order goods to non-central sites and the early emergence initially of a three-level and then, by 1870, a four-level hierarchy of shopping clusters. The pattern of retail clustering varied with the class and ethnic character of neighbourhoods, and clusters gravitated toward major arterial routes even in the pre-mass transit ear. Urban retailing in the second half of the nineteenth century was neither randomly dispersed nor over-whelmingly concentrated in a single central retail district, but developed a spatial hierarchy that clearly anticipated modern patterns.

Culture Regions, Homelands, and Ethnic Archipelagos in the United States: Methodological Considerations*

The concept of homeland has attracted little attention until now in American cultural geography, but it may offer meanings beyond those associated with culture areas or regions. This article considers homelands in light of other types of ethnic space and the criteria by which geographers recognize homelands in America. Indigenity, exclusivity, cultural vitality, resilience, and scale are major elements that form the foundation of a homeland, and, because they are necessary prerequisites, only a few cultural groups have to date developed recognizable ethnic homelands in the United States.

Introduction—All the World is not Los Angeles, Nor Chicago: Paradigms, Schools, Archetypes, and the Urban Process

The return of the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting to Chicago in 2006 after a decade visiting elsewhere did not in itself signify concern for the city’s historic role in shaping American geographers’ perceptions of urban structure and organization in contemporary life. There is a lot more to the discipline than curiosity about mere urban life. But when the Association does return to the place renowned for a longlived and widely recognized “model” of urban process, urban geographers cannot help but think of that connection. It was felt locally that the event could not pass without acknowledging Chicago’s singular role in that respect and confronting the serious challenge to its continuing relevance posed by the significant literature pointing to Los Angeles as a more appropriate model for understanding contemporary trends, at least among those who think it essential to acknowledge that we live in postmodern times. History takes a while to catch up with the claims of the avant garde. With respect to the frequency with which cities in the forefront of American cultural evolution have been visited by the AAG, Chicago has played host seven times (eight, if the 29th meeting in Evanston is allowed), beginning in 1907. There might have been a ninth occasion had the profession’s sentiment concerning events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention not diverted the 1969 meeting to the major “metropolis” of Ann Arbor, Michigan. By contrast, New York, first chosen in 1905, has played host just six times. Los Angeles was not admitted into this select league until 1981, and has been host only one other time since (in 2002). There is much ground still to be made up on that score. However, no matter how incidental these statistics are, they do reflect, however tangentially, the salience of Chicago in American life during the 20th century, even had Robert Park and Ernest Burgess not chosen to designate it an academic archetype. Meanwhile, a prodigious literature has been accumulating on the varied geographies of Los Angeles, and for the most part this literature has highlighted the departures that L.A. represents from the classical urban concepts associated with the Chicago model.

The Typological Process and the Morphological Period: A Cross-Cultural Assessment

The concepts ‘typological process’ and ‘morphological period’ have received surprisingly little empirical substantiation despite their familiarity to many urban morphologists. They are examined here in two contrasting cultural areas—England and the Shanghai area, China—over the period from the mid-19th century to the late-20th century. Sequences of ordinary residential building types are recognized in the two areas: for example, historical series of terraced house types in England and historical variations on the lilong development unit in the Shanghai area. Periods characterized by different types and connections between those types are identified. The areas are different in both their building types and their periodizations but commonalities in their processes of change, including those related to the spread of Western fashions, are found. The difficulty of uncovering the mechanism of the typological process whereby one form type is succeeded by another reflects major problems of assembling the requisite data. Many more comparative studies, including between contrasting cultural areas, are needed.

Historical geography changing spatial structure and social patterns of western cities

The historical perspective in urban geography today is enjoying a renaissance that would have been unthinkable 15 or 20 years ago. Both the volume of work and the quality of ideas have advanced to the point where evolutionary concepts about urban systems and structure are accepted elements of any general orientation to the subfield of urban geography. Traditional historical geography dealt reluctantly with cities, and among urban geographers, earlier interests in gross morphological change went into eclipse with the rise to eminence of quantified, functional urban

Metropolitan Chicago's Regional Cultural Park: Assessing the Development of the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor

Abstract The Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor is the first federally designated heritage area in the United States, pioneering a new kind of regional entity for retrieving history, revamping local economy, and advancing recreation and nature preservation–in this case in a highly urbanized setting–without federal ownership and executive power. What goals were set for this ambitious “partnership” initiative in voluntaristic regional planning when it was created in 1984, and what have been the tangible results so far? This article offers a broad assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this newly emerging form of public governance and regional transformation.

Core Concepts in Town-Plan Analysis

‘Town-plan analysis’ developed to account for those portions of the intricate patterns of spatial organization and visual character of towns and cities that can be retrieved from a study of the chief elements of their ground plan. It investigates the configurations of streets, plots and buildings created over time as cities have grown from unpretentious beginnings or bold designs into complex territorial compositions of built environment. Inevitably, the pressures of urbanization have usually triggered extensive modifications to original layouts, producing often complex alterations to the spatial structure of the urban core and variable impacts on the successive urban fringes of cities as they have expanded and been absorbed into the urban mass. Advances in town-plan analysis have created many useful concepts to explain the dynamic processes that have shaped and altered the ground plans of cities, and a selection of the most successful concepts is presented here. They lie at the core of a coherent system of urban morphological explanation.

Reflection: Cultural Forces in the American Landscapes

Like all territory altered by humans, landscapes in America reflect the varying influence of multiple and often conflicting cultural forces. Some extend across the continent, others are highly local, and some, as cultural exports, have come to affect – some would say, infect – landscapes around the world, for worse or for better. What are the human imperatives that have most profoundly shaped American landscapes in their own regional milieux from coast to coast? The following reflections necessarily concern primarily the coterminous forty-eight states of the United States. Hawaii’s mid-Pacific position owes so much to Oceania and Asia, and in Alaska nature keeps human transformation so markedly at bay, that they call for their own distinctive interpretation.

Understanding Great Plains Urbanization Through the Lens of South Dakota Townscapes

Abstract Most towns were crucial to the initial colonization and economic development of the Great Plains. Many were, directly or indirectly, creatures of railroad corporate planning, owing their location as well as their physical layout to the townsite companies controlled by railroad officials. This article examines how these facts shaped the fundamental long-term look of urban South Dakota, and by extension that of the Great Plains, and how later, even with the railroads regression and the shift to the modern highway, that history remains embedded in contemporary townscapes. But the image is not a single one—there are at least six different urban South Dakotas set within the states varied geography, each of which will be briefly characterized.