Paul M. Hohenberg

The making of urban Europe, 1000-1994

Introduction: Urdanization in Perspective PART I: The Preindustrial Age: eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries 1. Structure and Functions of Medieval Towns 2. Systems of Early Cities 3. The Demography of Preindustrial Cities PART II: The Industrial Age: Fourteenth to Eighteenth Centuries 4. Cities in the Early Modern European Economy 5. Beyond Baroque Urbanism PART III: The Industrial Age: Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries 6. Industrial and the Cities 7. Urban Growth and Urban Systems 8. The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization 9. The Evolution and Control of Urban Space 10. Europes Cities in the Twentieth Century Appendix A: A Cyclical Model of an Economy Appendix B: Size Distributions and the Ranks-Size Rule Notes Bibliography Index

The historical geography of European cities: An interpretive essay

Over a millennium Europe has become largely urban. While urban growth, absolute and as a percentage of a growing population, has been as dramatic as economic change, many elements of continuity tie the present to the past. This evolution with path dependence is highlighted if one looks at European urban economies in terms of a dual systems model combining central place and network relationships. After the medieval push of town creation and differentiation, the early modern period saw a slowing of the increase in urban population and proportion, even as cities anchored the growth of overseas trade and of integrated territorial states. Growth was concentrated in major ports and capital or court cities. The role of cities in the rise of a market economy capable of sustained growth in output per head is tied to ongoing debates about how and why growth began in Europe, and within Europe in England. Industrialization led to enormous increases in urban agglomeration driven by transport improvements and increasing returns to scale in manufacturing as well as distribution. However, leadership functions tended to concentrate in giant capital cities rather than in the new industrial towns and conurbations. Within cities, rapid in-migration and lags in institutions and technology for urban management aggravated crowding and squalor. Conditions improved toward the turn of the 20th century, thanks in part to electricity and to more responsive and active government, as well as to slower urbanization. The depression and destruction of the 1914-1945 period was followed by great prosperity and enormous building. The information age appears to have conflicting impacts on agglomeration in Europe, with policy leaning toward sustaining dense cities (relative at least to the U.S.). The shift from older to newer industries, as well as growth in leisure and high human capital pursuits, has shifted activity away from many 19th century industrial centers and toward revitalized older cities and urbanized regions with higher amenity levels.

Toward a More Useful Economic History

Torn between divergent disciples, economic history needs to prove its usefulness as well as its scholarly virtuosity. Innovations in method and data have carried the field forward, but perhaps not fulfilled the claims of their champions. To economics in particular, economic history contributes a richer sense of space and time, and the importance of demographic factors. Three vignettes attempt to illustrate that useful economic history can result from confrontations of past and present that improve our understanding of both. Finally, emerging developments in the underlying fields may herald a more central future role for our discipline.

What Price the Information Age: A Model for Fair Payment for the Use of Information

As the flow of information becomes more intensive as well as more important to production and work in general, its economic properties come under closer scrutiny. Although produced, traded, and used like other commodities, information differs in significant respects from most goods. The development of more flexible man-machine interfaces heightens the relevance of questions such as what is being purchased, how is its value determined, how can it be priced, which are discussed in this paper in some detail.

Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 . Edited by S. R. Epstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 343.

Karl Marx put the relations of town and country at the core of the processes by which capitalism arose in Europe: division of labor, commercialization, formation of the bourgeois class, changing (power) relations of production, the whole lot. Today too, the student of emergent capitalism must focus on that nexus, even though to do so is to wrestle with some of the most enduring puzzles, as well as the complexities and varieties, of Europes early modern age. The collection edited by S. R. Epstein adds to our knowledge of how these urban–rural relations evolved over much of Europe, though it will certainly not resolve the puzzles, nor lay bare the mechanisms, of the run-up to industrialization and sustained economic growth. More disappointing is the lack of comparative perspective, despite the editors dutiful call for more of it.

64.95.

Introduction. 1. Emergence from the Ancient World. 2. The Creation of a New Urban System. 3. The Touching Up of the Urban Environment. 4. Confrontation with the World. 5. The Difficult Adjustment to the Laws of Perspective. 6. The Industrial City. 7. Europe in the Contemporary World.

The European City.

Urbanization in Europe from the year 1000 to 1950 is reviewed. The work is primarily a study in economic and social history but considerable emphasis is given to the demographic and geographic aspects of Europes urban development over time. The approach is chronological with parts devoted to the preindustrial age the proto-industrial age from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries and the industrial age. (ANNOTATION)