Salam to all. guys i am starting the notes of paper 2 now onwards.i will request senior members for rectifications of mistakes and juinor members to contribute with me in this whole process.

i pray to ALLAH PAK for giving me strength to complete these notes and guide me to provide you true and authentic information.if i do any mistake than i hope HE will forgive for that.AMEEN.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

THEORY OF DETERMINISIM

Environmental Determinism - The Controversy of Environmental Determinism

CULTURES, ENVIRONMENTS, AND REGIONS

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INTRODUCTION

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Culture is an all-encompassing term that defines the tangible lifestyle of a people and their prevailing values and beliefs. The concept of culture is closely identified with anthropology. Over more than a century ago most anthropologists believed that culture was learned. However, recent advances in sociobiology and related fields suggest that certain behaviors may be genetically deter-mined, so that culture has an "instinctive" component as well as a "learned" one. This chapter discusses the development of culture, the human imprint on the landscape, culture and environment, and cultural perceptions and processes. The key points covered in this chapter are outlined below.

Culture and Human Geography


The concept of culture lies at the heart of human geography. Locational decisions, patterns, and landscapes are fundamentally influenced by cultural attitudes and practices. The concept of culture, like the regional concept discussed in the previous chapter, appears to be deceptively simple, but in fact is complex and challenging. The definitions of culture vary widely, as does our use of the word itself, but all refer in one way or another to humans—their development, ideas, and adaptation to the world in which they live.


Components


Culture is made up of four major components. The first of these is a cultural trait—a single attribute of a culture—such as eating with certain utensils. The second component is a cultural complex—a discrete combination of traits exhibited by a particular culture—such as keeping cattle for different purposes. The third component is a culture system—culture complexes with traits in common that can be grouped together—such as ethnicity, language, religion, and other cultural elements. The final component, the cultural region—the area within which a particular culture sys-tem prevails—is marked by all the attributes of a culture. Cultural regions may be expressed on a map, but many geographers prefer to describe these as geographic regions since their definition is based on a combination of cultural properties plus locational and environmental circumstances.




Topics

Key topics in cultural geography include cultural landscapes—the human imprint on the Earth's surface. These create a distinct and characteristic landscape that reveals much about the culture presently occupying the area, as well as those that came before. A second key topic focuses on cultural hearths—the sources of civilizations from which radiate ideas, innovations, and ideologies. Cultural geographers identify both ancient and modern cultural hearths.
******** Cultural diffusion—the process by which innovations and ideas spread to other areas—involves several types of diffusion. Expansion diffusion may take the form of contagious diffusion, where some item of culture is spread through a local population by contact from person to person. In the case of hierarchical diffusion, another form of expansion diffusion, an idea or innovation spreads by trickling down from larger to smaller adoption units. Innovations often leapfrog over wide areas, with geographic distance a less important influence. The early spread of the FAX machine is a good example of this type of diffusion. A third type of expansion diffusion is stimulus diffusion, a process where an idea or innovation is not readily adopted by a population but results in local experimentation and eventual changes in the way of doing things. The Industrial Revolution, for example, did not immediately spread to pre- or non-industrial societies, but did stimulate attempts to mechanize local handicraft production.
******** The different forms of expansion diffusion take place through populations that are stable. It is the innovation or idea that does the moving. Relocation diffusion—the spreading of innovations by a migrating population—involves the actual movement of individuals who have already adopted the idea or innovation, and who carry it to a new, perhaps distant locale, where they disseminate it. The spread of European emigrants around the world during the period of Europeanization is a classic example.

****** The topic of cultural perception*—the way that members of a culture view themselves as well as how they view other cultures—is a combination of tangible and intangible elements that help to define the personality of a region. We all have impressions and images of various regions and cultures, even though they may not always be accurate. Perceptual regions are intellectual constructs designed to help us understand the nature and distribution of phenomena in human geography. These perceptions are based on our accumulated knowledge about such regions and cultures. Perceptual regions can differ considerably, depending on the individual's mental maps of various communities and cultures.

******** The final considered topic, cultural environment—the relationships between human societies and the natural environment—is complex. Environment affects societies in countless ways from the types of crops grown to the houses they build, but societies also modify their natural environments in ways that range from slight to severe. One thing is certain, however. While human behavior is not controlled by the environment (as the now-defunct concept of environmental determinism suggested), no culture, no matter how sophisticated, can completely escape the forces of nature.*

OUTLINE

A. Geographical analysis of population
1. Density, distribution, and scale
2. Consequences of various densities and distributions
3. Patterns of composition: age, sex, race, and ethnicity
4. Population and natural hazards: past, present, and future

B. Population growth and decline over time and space
1. Historical trends and projections for the future
2. Theories of population growth, including the Demographic Model
3. Patterns of fertility, mortality, and health
4. Regional variations of demographic transitions
5. Effects of population policies

C. Population movement
1. Push and pull factors
2. Major voluntary and involuntary migrations at different scales
3. Migration selectivity
4. Short-term, local movements, and activity space

LOCATION, DISTRIBUTION, AND DENSITY

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INTRODUCTION

No event in human history has equaled the rapid increase in population over the last 10,000 years. This is in sharp contrast to the 200,000 years following the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, during which the earth's human population grew very slowly, its numbers rising and falling in res-ponse to the "traditional" controllers of population: environmental change, disease, and availability of food. As the last glaciation retreated and the Holocene epoch began, the amount of habitable space increased and unprecedented events began to occur in Earth's history.
******** The study of population is termed demography, derived from ancient Greek words roughly meaning to "describe and write about people." The focus of population geography is on the spatial aspects of demography. The key questions in geography are where and why there? These lead to some penetrating insights into population issues.


Population Growth


The dominant issue in population geography remains growth. The world's population is currently growing at a rate that is more than ten times the total estimated world population at the beginning of the Holocene and the bulk of this growth is occurring in the world's poorer countries. The Earth's environments and natural resources are strained as never before by the needs of a mush-rooming human population, a population that has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Problems resulting from unprecedented population growth became especially acute in the twentieth century. A continued high rate of population growth in the twenty-first century can have a calamitous im-pact, causing irreversible damage to the natural systems on which we depend for our existence and survival.



Population Distribution


From the beginning, humanity has been unevenly distributed over the land and this pattern was* in-tensified during the twentieth century. Whether urban or rural, populations tend to cluster in certain areas (see text Figure 4-1) because, as you will recall from earlier discussions, much of the Earth is unsuitable for human occupancy (refer back to text figures 3-4 and 3-5). To handle contrasts of this type on maps, geographers use measures of population distribution—the locations on the Earth's surface where individuals or groups (depending on the scale of the map) are concentrated —and the density of the population figured as the number of people per unit area of land.
******** Text Figure 4-1 shows patterns of population distribution for the world using the dot method. It shows that the world's three largest population concentrations all lie on the Eurasian landmass —East Asia, South Asia, and Europe—each associated with a major civilization. It also reminds us that the overwhelming majority of the world's population inhabits the Northern Hemi-sphere.
******** East Asia, centered on China but extending to Korea and Japan, contains about one-quarter of the world's population—nearly 1.3 billion in China alone. The map shows that the population is concentrated toward the coast with ribbon-like extensions found on the basins and lowlands of China's major rivers. The great majority of people in East Asia are farmers.
******** India lies at the center of the South Asian concentration with extensions to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the island of Sri Lanka. This is one of the greatest concentrations of people on Earth with about 1.5 billion people. It is a confined region (the Himalaya Mountains on the north and the desert west of the Indus River in Pakistan) with a rapidly growing population. By almost any estimate, the capacity of the region to support this population has been exceeded. As in East Asia, the majority are farmers.
******** Europe, the third-ranking population cluster, also lies in Eurasia but at the opposite end from China. This cluster contains about 700 million people, which puts it in a class with the South Asian concentration, but the similarity ends there. In Europe, unlike East and South Asia, terrain and environment are not as closely related to population distribution. Another contrast lies in the fact that the majority of the European population live in cities and towns, leaving the rural country-side more open and sparsely populated. These contrasts with the East and South Asian clusters reflect the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Europe over the last 200-plus years.


Population Density


Population density can be measured on the basis of several different criteria, revealing contrasting aspects of a country's demography. Text Figure 4-2 illustrates density via the isopleth method. The data in Resource B at the end of your textbook provide area, total population, and density per square mile for every country. One must examine such data with caution, however, since the high cost and organizational challenges of census taking often produce unreliable data. Arithmetic and physiologic population densities are the two most common approaches. These two methods become more meaningful and useful when compared with each other.




PROCESSES AND CYCLES OF POPULATION CHANGE

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INTRODUCTION


Population does not increase in an even manner from country to country. The differences include age, gender, life expectancy, and geographic distribution, and may be identified between countries but are more significant internally. A country that has a large percentage of its population at 15 years of age or below will have enormous needs for education, jobs, and housing in the years ahead. A country where the population is "aging," such as the United States or France, can face shortages of younger workers and problems with their retirement systems. The list goes on but you get the point: a population is far more than mere numbers. This is an extremely important chapter, and when you have studied it, you will have a much better understanding of the complex issues of world population.


Population Trends


Never before in human history have so many people filled the Earth's living space, and never has world population grown as rapidly as it has during the past 100 years. The population explosion of the past 200 years has increased the world's population from under 1 billion to approximately 6 billion. It took from the dawn of history to the year 1820 for the Earth's population to reach 1 billion. It now is taking only a decade to add each new billion. It is still possible that there will be 10 billion human inhabitants on the planet by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Population Growth Rates


Rapid population growth varies over time and space. Europe's rapid growth occurred during the nineteenth century, the result of the Second Agricultural Revolution. At this time better farming methods and improved organization resulted in increased food supplies, especially to cities and towns. This was immediately followed by the Industrial Revolution, during which sanitation facilities made the towns and cities safer from epidemics, and modern medical practices became wide spread. Disease prevention through vaccination introduced a new era in public health. Death rates declined markedly—by 50 percent between 1750 and 1850—while birth rates remained high. The change is especially spectacular when viewed in the context of doubling time—the number of years it takes a population to double—which was 150 years in 1750 but only 35 years in 1850.

******** One effect of this increase in the rate of natural population growth was increased migration. Millions of people left Europe to emigrate to other parts of the world—North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere. When European colonization began in earnest during the nineteenth century, Europeans brought with them their newfound methods of sanitation and medical techniques and death rates in Africa, India, and South America began to decline. Indigenous populations began to grow, and at ever-increasing rates. Today, South America's growth rates have declined, but Africa's remain high. As mentioned previously, the fastest-growing populations to-day are invariably taking place in those poorer countries that have the greatest difficulties providing the basic amenities of life for their citizens.
******** Disease and famine were the major controllers of population for the world as a whole until the last 100 years. Diseases still kill millions of people each year, especially infants and children, but the overall effects have been reduced, at least in many countries.


Reduction of Growth Rates


Reducing population growth rates is a complicated and sensitive issue. In the richer, more developed countries, general modernization and education has resulted in lower growth rates. Therefore, these countries total populations do not approach those of the poorer countries. The benefits enjoy-ed by the wealthier, developed nations that have led to their slower rates of population have not been shared by much of the world. A key issue to the reduction of population growth rates is to improve the status of women and to secure their rights in society. In the Muslim countries of South- west Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, two of the regions with the highest rates of population growth, women often live in near-Medieval conditions or, at best, as second-class citizens. Tradition plays a powerful role, but the barrier to better education for women is the real key. In places where women's education levels have risen, there has been an accompanying decline in population growth rates; not to mention a general improvement in the well-being of the population.
******** The demographic transition model, which compares birth and death rates in a population over time, suggests that the world's population will stabilize in the twenty-first century, but the model may not be universally applicable. The sequence of stages of the demographic transition has been observed in several European countries, but what transpired economically and socially in Europe may not apply for the rest of the world. It may be unwise, therefore, to assume that the demographic cycles that have occurred in already-industrialized countries will eventually spread to the rest of the world.

__________________
GEO to aise k sab tumhara ha,MARO to aisa jaise tmhara kuch bhi nhi.

Maza deti han zindagi ki thokerin unko,jinhen NAAM-E-KHUDA le kar sanbhal janey ki adat ho.

Migration

INTRODUCTION


Humans have always been mobile. Throughout history humans have sought new frontiers and the search still continues today. For more than 90 percent of human history there were hunter-gatherers, a practice that required frequent relocation. Such movement is called migration and while the reasons for such movement are different today, human mobility has actually increased in modern times.
Human mobility is of central interest in human geography because it is an inherently spatial process. Human movement speeds the diffusion of ideas and innovations. It intensifies spatial interaction and transforms whole regions. And as you will see in this chapter, it is often closely linked to environmental conditions.


Why People Move?


Many factors stimulate the migration process. They include armed conflict, economic conditions (real or perceived), political strife, cultural circumstances (such as linguistic or religious differences), environmental change (growing more common today), and technological advances (which makes information about destinations more easily obtainable and movement easier). Migration today occurs for various reasons but those listed are the principle ones.

Migrants move on the basis of their perceptions of particular destinations, taking into consideration both direction and distance. Direction, like location, can be viewed in two ways: absolute and relative. Absolute direction refers to astronomically determined direction and thus is what we think of as compass direction. Relative direction is more perceptual and often imprecise, W in the ewe of the Sunbelt. The residents of North Dakota, for example, would agree that it lies to the south and that Florida is part of the Sunbelt, but not everyone would agree that Utah is also. Different people have different perceptions.

Distance, like direction, can be measured in both absolute and relative terms. Absolute distance is the physical distance between two points usually using kilometers or miles; it can be read on maps using the scale of the map. Absolute distance does not change. Relative distance-measured not in linear terms such as miles or kilometers, but in term such as cost or time-bas different meanings for different people and cultures. It can change due to, say, a new method of transportation or the discovery of a shorter route. Research has shown that people's perception of both distance and direction can be greatly distorted and that distance particularly affects the accuracy of migrants perception of their destinations.


Forms of Human Mobility


Mobility of all kinds is one of the defining characteristics of a culture. The great majority of people have a daily routine that takes them through a regular sequence of short moves that geographers call activity (or action) space. The magnitude of activity space varies in different societies, and American society is the world’s most mobile. Technology has greatly expanded activity spaces, particularly in the wealthier, more developed countries.

There are three general types of movement recognized by geographers and others who study human mobility. (cyclic movement—movement that has a closed route—defines your activity space. When you go to daily classes or a job you are participating in cyclic movement.* If your trip involves a lengthy period of residency after your arrival—such as temporary relocation for college attendance or service in the armed services—you engaged in periodic movement. Both cyclic and periodic movements occur in many forms. Finally, migratory movement describes human movement from a source to a destination without a return journey, and is the most significant form of movement discussed in this chapter. A society’s mobility is measured as the sum of cyclic, periodic, and migratory movement of its population.


Patterns Of Migration

Rarely does migration take place in a single step, rather it usually takes place in stages. Rural-to-urban movement occurs in steps, often to a small community and then to a lager one and perhaps eventually to an even larger one in a region of more favorable environmental conditions. Migrants also tend to relocate repeatedly after reaching the end of their destination. Early immigrants to America, for example, often first settled in regions where relatives or friends were located, moving "West" after a time seeking land of their own or better opportunity, often moving several times before settling permanently. Some, of course, found the new surroundings not to their liking and returned cast or perhaps to their original source region in a counter or return migration. Almost all migration flows have this aspect.


Factors Of Migration


The decision to migrate usually results from a combination of conditions and perceptions that tend to induce people to leave their abodes, Geographers who study human migration call the negative conditions and perceptions push factors. The positive conditions and perceptions that effectively attract people to new locale from other areas are called pull factors (see Focus on: Theories About Migration). Push factors are likely to be perceived more accurately than pull factors, since people are more likely to be familiar with their place of residence (source) than the locale to which they are moving. Push factors include individual considerations ranging from work or retirement conditions to weather and climate. Pull factors tend to be more vague and many migrants move on the basis of excessively positive images and expectations regarding their destinations.

Our final look at the reasons people move focuses on the luxury of choice and the fear of compulsion. These may be classed as voluntary and forced migrations. There are different cases within each of these categories and it is not always easy to make a clear determination. In the case of the millions of Europeans who came to the Americas, most were seeking opportunity and better living conditions. These same motives carried others far from Europe to the African and Asian colonies.

The prevailing force was the pull of opportunity and thus for the most part, emigrants from Europe left by choice.
Several of the worlds largest migration streams have been forced migrations, which result from the imposition of power by stronger peoples over weaker ones. By far the most important of these was the Transatlantic slave trade, which carried tens of millions of Africans from their homes to the Americas, with enormous loss of life. From 12 million to over 30 million Africans were sold into slavery and nothing in human history compares to the Atlantic slave trade. Both source and destination regions were affected, with the African sources being socially and demographically devastated for generations. Forced counter migration continues today when governments send back migrants caught entering their countries illegally.*



Permanent Relocation


The past five centuries have witnessed human migration on an unprecedented scale, much of it generated by events in Europe. The voluntary migration of Europeans to the New World, the migration of Europeans to their overseas colonial empires (these two migrations may have totaled 75 million between 1835 and 1935), and the forced migration of Africans to the Americas, are among migration streams that have transformed the world. The immense impact of the forced migration of Africans during the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic sets it apart from all the other migrations.

When early humans began migrating from Africa to Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas, they faced only natural boundaries. Rivers and mountain ranges may have presented barriers, but they did not stop the inexorable march of human migration. For today’s migrants, political boundaries, not natural ones, form the most difficult obstacles. Agencies that monitor the annual stream of human migration use the world’s political framework to keep track of migrants. Those who cross international borders are external migrants and those who relocate within their national boundaries are internal migrants. In any given year, internal migrants greatly outnumber external migrants. However, it is the external migrants who change countries’ vital statistics, affect their economies, and often influence their politics.

External migrations took Europeans to America and other parts of the world; the arrival of the Europeans, in turn, caused other people to move (set text Figure 1-i). External migrations (authorized movements and organized resettlements, as well as refugee movements) usually occur after wars. Following World War II, Germans migrated westward from their homes in Eastern Europe and millions of migrants left Europe altogether to go to the United States.

Internal migration involves relocation within a country. Such movements can also produce significant population shifts, even though the migrants do not cross any international borders. Internal migrations, involving major population shifts, have occurred in the former Soviet Union, the United States, China, and other large countries. Such movements are usually easier to accomplish because no inter-national borders are crossed. For the same reason, the numbers of people moving is more difficult to determine, at least in most countries.

We noted earlier that Americans are the world’s most mobile people. Etched on the U.S. population map are the effects of two historic internal migrations; the westward movement of the population as a whole, and the northward migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The West is still a major migration destination as can be seen in Figure 7-5. In the United States, the North-east and the Midwest have been losing population for decades, while the South and West have been gaining.


*Controlling Migration


Migration control and its attendant problems have become hot issues around the world. Efforts to restrict migrations are nothing new; media coverage, democratic debate, and political wrangling only make it seem so. China’s Great Wall was built in part as a barrier to emigration, as was the Berlin Wall and the fences along the Rio Grande—all evidence of the desire of governments to control the movement of people across their borders. Physical as well as legal barriers are placed in the way of migrants, but few countries have succeeded in controlling immigration effectively

__________________
GEO to aise k sab tumhara ha,MARO to aisa jaise tmhara kuch bhi nhi.

Maza deti han zindagi ki thokerin unko,jinhen NAAM-E-KHUDA le kar sanbhal janey ki adat ho.

POPULATION STRUCTURE

Population Structure


MODEL OF POPUALTION CHANGE



Model of Population Change


REASONS OF POPULATION CHANGE


Reasons for Population Change


CHANGING POPULATION GROWTH


Changing Population Growth



POPULATION DEPENDENCY RATIO


Population Dependency Ratio


REGARDS SABAHAT

__________________
GEO to aise k sab tumhara ha,MARO to aisa jaise tmhara kuch bhi nhi.

Maza deti han zindagi ki thokerin unko,jinhen NAAM-E-KHUDA le kar sanbhal janey ki adat ho.

Sayeeda sahabat,sister where are the facts and figures..

sayeeda information you are posting already in books.. But there are many of the Qs which have not been answered..

can you please tell me regional Population distribution and also South Asian population population

And crops such as cotton,rice figures are not given in your posts..

Sister if you want I can give you mail me the notes at my email..Please help me ..

first tell me those question which have not been answered.

dear wikkipedia per search ker lo sara data mil jay ga. notes are not stored in my computer i type them,so sorry i cant mail you.

try to find out the figures yourself,i am too busy these days i will try to post them if i will find time.

regards sabahat

__________________
GEO to aise k sab tumhara ha,MARO to aisa jaise tmhara kuch bhi nhi.

Maza deti han zindagi ki thokerin unko,jinhen NAAM-E-KHUDA le kar sanbhal janey ki adat ho.

ok sister thanks for your reply.. whenever you feel comfortable mail me the notes at my emai address..My email id is Alinamubin@gmail.com

* List of countries by population 2011


List of countries by population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Population Statistics/growth


Wholesome Words Christian Website

from content go to mission and then harverd field statistics.

World Crop Distribution


Global Crop Production Analysis


regards sabahat

__________________
GEO to aise k sab tumhara ha,MARO to aisa jaise tmhara kuch bhi nhi.

Maza deti han zindagi ki thokerin unko,jinhen NAAM-E-KHUDA le kar sanbhal janey ki adat ho.

Thanks dear, I copied your Physical geography notes as well. these are really beneficial for me. Thanks for your ongoing contributions

__________________
Guide us on the straight path;
the path of those whom You have blessed.

. Urbanization and Globalization

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outline

A. Definitions of urbanism B. Origin and evolution of cities

1. Historical patterns of urbanization
2. Rural-urban migration and urban growth
3. Global cities and megacities
4. Models of urban systems

C. Functional character of contemporary cities
1. Changing employment mix
2. Changing demographic and social structures

D. Built environment and social space
1. Comparative models of internal city structure
2. Transportation and infrastructure
3. Political organization of urban areas
4. Urban planning and design
5. Patterns of race, ethnicity, gender, and class
6. Uneven development, ghettoization, and gentrification
7. Impacts of suburbanization and edge cities
[U]

CIVILIZATION AND URBANIZATION

INTRODUCTION


The process of urbanization intensified the concentration of humanity that had already begun with agri*culture. Cities are a relatively recent development of human culture made possible by a stable food sup*ply. The need for central authority, organization, and coordination of effort produced the foundations for city formation. Social stratification was followed by the emergence of government, law, and the refine*ment of culture. The next challenge facing humanity is the success of cities with the opportunities and problems they present as we enter the twenty-first century.

Virtually everywhere in the world, people are moving from the countryside to towns and cities. This migration is happening so fast that the various agencies that monitor such movements cannot agree on the pace. The problem of undependable census data and inconsistent definitions make agreement all but impossible. There is, however, agreement on one point: in the twenty-first century, the world will be predominantly urban.


Early Development


The first agricultural settlements were true villages and remained so 6r several thousand years. They were small and did not vary much in size and there was apparently no governmental authority beyond the village. There were no public buildings and no workshops. These egalitarian societies—a society that is unstratified socially and all members have equal status—persisted long after agriculture was introduced. Urbanization and the formation of states transformed egalitarian societies into stratified, functionally specialized ones. This process occurred independently in several regions, probably first in the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia.

The period between about 7000 B.C. and 5000 B.C. is called the formative era for both the develop*ment of states and urbanization. The two obviously went hand in hand—in Southwest Asia. The egalitarian society had become a stra4fied society. Now there were priests, merchants, administrators soldiers, farmers, and craftspeople The city had become the focus of civilization.

Diffusion in the Mediterranean Region

Urbanization spread from Mesopotamia in several directions. On the Mediterranean island of Crete, more than 3500 years ago, Knossos was the cornerstone of a system of towns of the Minoan civilization. Ideas about city life may have reached Greece from several directions but whatever the case, during the third millennium B.P., Greece became one of the most highly urbanized areas on Earth. The ancient Greeks thus assimilated concepts of urban life from Mesopotainia al well as Minoa, and the urbanization of ancient Greece ushered in a new stage in the evolution of cities. Some 2500 years ago they had produced the most highly urbanized society of their time with a network more than 500 cities and towns, not only on the mainland but also on the many Greek islands.


The Roman Urban System


The great majority of Greece’s cities and towns were located near the Mediterranean Sea, linking penin*sulas and islands. When the Romans succeeded the Greeks as riders of the region, their empire incor*porated not only the Mediterranean shores but also a large part of interior Europe and North Africa.
The ancient Romans combined local traditions with Greek customs in building an urban system that extended from Britain to Mesopotamia. The Roman urban system was the largest yet. The capital, Rome, was the apex of a hierarchy of settlements from small villages to large cities. A transportation network linked all of the urban centers of the Roman Empire together by a network of land and water routes. Efficiency was a Roman hallmark: urban places were positioned a modest distance from each other so that they could be reached in a reasonable amount of time. Some of their surface routes still serve European motorists today. The Roman road builders created a grid of communications to link the empire together.


Preindustrial Europe

Greek and Roman concepts of urbanization diffused into Western Europe, but Europe’s preindustrial cities were poorly organized, unsanitary, overcrowded, and uncomfortable places to live for the majority of their inhabitants. The adage of the good old days hardly applies. More efficient weapons and the invention of gunpowder forced cities to develop more extensive fortifications; fortifications that could not simply be moved outward. The greater numbers of people could only be housed by building upward, and four-and-five-storied tenements began to appear. For the ordinary people, the overcrowded cities were no place to be. When the chaise came, many decided to leave for America, Australia, and other parts of the world

Urban Stages

Cities evolve in stages. The traders’ mercantile city gave way to the factory-dominated manufacturing center, and the automobile enabled the evolution of the suburbanized modern city. Today’s post-modern cities reflect the age of high technology.






URBANIZATION AND LOCATION


INTRODUCTION


The site of a city is essential to early success and long-term survival. Many early cities would find them*selves losing their early site advantage as civilizations, and technology evolved and changed. Colonization and industrialization would transform ‘ Western Europe and the world from rural to urban with varying results. People migrate to cities, now and in the past, in response to factors that are often more perceptual than real.

Lifestyle may in fact be worse, not better, for those participating in rural-to-urban movement hi many countries today. The birth of the world urban map of the late 1990s can be traced to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the medieval ‘and mercantile cities of Europe . In less than two centuries, Western Europe ’s population went from overwhelmingly rural to 85 percent urban. This aston*ishing transformation was the beginning of a worldwide process set in motion by colonialism and the diffusion of industrial know-how.
Urban Geography

The study of how cities function, their internal systems and structures and the external influences on them is the field of urban geography. Urban geographers want to know how cities are arranged, what they look like, how their circulation systems function, how commuting patterns develop and change, how and why people move from one part of the city to another.

In short, how and why a city and its residents look, act, and change as they do. To do these studies, of course, you need to have urban places.
All cities’ are not equally successful, An urban centers location strongly influences its fortunes, its position in a large and productive hinterland—surrounding service area—can ensure its well-being. The hinterland reveals the economic reach of each settlement, the maximum distance at which people are still attracted for business purposes

Locational Factors

The answer to the question of why some urban centers are more successful than others is geography. When it comes to explaining the growth and success of certain cities, situation—the external locational attributes of an urban center; its relative location or regional position with reference to other non-local places—is often the key.

A city’s situation can change, and the world’s largest and most enduring cities have seen their situation improve with the times. Conversely, a city’s situation can also deteriorate over time. Exhaustion of resources, repeated crop failures, climatic change, and political developments all can change a city’s situation.

A second locational factor affecting the development of cities and towns is their site—the actual physical qualities of the place a city occupies. An urban centers site may have played a key role in its original and early survival, for example, as a defensive locale; but in modern times that same site may limit its growth and expansion. Air stagnation, depleted water supplies, or changes in transportation routes and means can reduce a previously advantageous site to a liability.
Urbanization in the 1990s

As a percentage of total population, urban dwellers are most numerous in the core areas of Western Europe , North America , Japan , and Australia . There are also remarkably high percentages of urbanization in several countries in the periphery. In addition, urbanization is currently occurring rapidly in many peripheral countries, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently this region has both the lowest percentage of its population classed as urban and the fastest growing urban population in the world. Taking 70 percent and higher as the highest category, Mexico and Cuba are on a par with France , and Mexico ’s level of urbanization is higher than that of several Eastern European countries.
The culturally and economically diverse realm of Southwest Asia and North Africa displays re*markable variation in levels of urbanization. This variation is related to differences in national economics and cultures. Much of the realm, the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula , is quite highly urbanized. Nucleation resulting from the oil industry has much to do with this situation.
Urbanization in South Asia remains low. For the realm as a whole, urbanization remains well be*low 30 percent. Southeast Asia , as a realm, is markedly low levels of urbanization (the city-state of Singapore is 100 percent urban; the only such country in the world). As a whole, East Asia is only about 36 percent urban, despite the rapid economic growth on the western Pacific Rim .

The Great Cities

More than 300 cities in the world have populations exceeding 1 million. former map shows the concentration of large cities in eastern North America , Western Europe , and Japan . Several of the great urban complexes in these regions are the products of megalopolitan coalescence. The fastest-growing megacities, however, are in South and East Asia .
Many of the worlds most populous cities are found in the poorer countries, and it also indicates how fast individual cities in poorer countries are growing compared to conurbations in richer countries. Despite wretched living conditions for many of their inhabitants, cities continue to attract new residents by the millions.

URBAN PATTERN AND STRUCTURE


INTRODUCTION


From rather humble beginnings, the development of cities has produced a complex settlement pattern that is changing the face of the Earth and the way humans use and occupy it. A city’s spatial organization reflects the culture that built it whether that culture is traditional or advanced. The common denominators of all cities are growth and change. While it is doubtful that the urbanization experiences of the industrialized Western countries can, or even should be duplicated, in much of the world there is no doubt that urbani*zation is the next step in human cultural evolution.

Geographers have recognized that the relationships between cities and the surrounding countryside can be measured and mapped, Every city and town has an adjacent region within which its influence is dominant. Farmers in that region sell many of their products on the city’s markets, and customers from smaller towns and villages come to the city to shop and to conduct other business. The city’s dominance can be seen in many other areas of life as well, such as the surrounding trade zone or hinterland, the sur*rounding region from which people travel into the city for work, business, or pleasure. In general, large cities tend to lie farther apart than smaller ones; towns lie still closer together, and villages are separated by even shorter distances. Investigating the above patterns ultimately leads to the study of the anatomy of the city itself; its internal structure and functions.
Interurban Spatial Organization

The Industrial Revolution occurred almost a century later in the United States than in Europe. When it finally did cross the Atlantic in the 1870s, it progressed so robustly that only 50 years later America surpassed Europe as the world's mightiest industrial power.

The impact of industrial urbanization was felt at two levels. At the national level, there quickly emerged a network of cities specialized in the collection, processing, and distribution of raw materials and manufactured goods, and linked together by an even more efficient web of transport routes. The whole process unfolded so quickly that planning was impossible. Almost literally, near the turn of the twentieth century America awoke to discover that it had built a number of large cities.

In the United States, the urban system evolved through five stages of development determined by prevailing modes of transport and industry. Today’s period of high technology, still in the process of transforming the modern city, dates from the 1970s.


Urban Functions


Every urban center has an economic base, with some workers employed in basic (that is, goods-producing) sectors that satisfy demand in the hinterland or markets even farther away. These activities produce goods for export and generate an inflow of money. On the other hand, workers who maintain city streets, clerks who work in offices, and teachers who teach in city schools are responsible for the functions of the city itself. This is the nonbasic (also called the service) sector. Some people who work in a city, of course, do some of each. A mechanic may serve customers from a village in the city’s hinterland, where there are no repair facilities, while also serving city residents.

This employment structure—the number of people employed in various basic and nonbasic jobs— reveals the primary functions a city performs. You should note that all cities have multiple functions, and the larger the city, the larger the number of functions. Some cities, however, are dominated by one particular activity. This functional specialization was a characteristic of European cities even before the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution gave it new meaning. This was once true in America as well, but the situation revealed no longer exists, at least tothe extent shown on the maps. As urban centers grow, they tend to lose their specialization.


Central Places


The notion of a hierarchy of urban places, discussed earlier, identifies urban settlements ranging from hamlets to metropolises and is based not only on population but also on functions and services. These functions and services attract customers from both the urban areas and areas beyond the urban limits Thus every urban center has a certain economic reach that can be used as a measure of its centrality—the strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities.


[B]In 1933, Walter Christaller laid the groundwork for central place theory. Christaller attempted to develop a model that would show how and where central places in the urban hierarchy (hamlets, villages, towns, and cities) would be functionally distributed, based on their respective provision of central goods and services—goods and services that a central place makes available to its consumers in a surrounding region—as opposed to those universally available. While not totally applicable in the real world, central place theory helps to explain why, under ideal circumstances, small urban places such as villages lie closer together while larger cities lie far apart.


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Urban Structure


Cities are not simply random collections of buildings and people. They exhibit functional structure: they are spatially organized to perform their functions as places of commerce, production, education, and much more. Throughout the past century urban geographers have attempted to construct models that would account for the geographic layout of cities (see Focus on: Three Classic Models of Urban Structure). The task grew more complicated as manufacturing cities became modern cities and modern cities became postmodern. Today urban geographers identify superregions that they call urban realms, and they create models that show cities within cities.

Models of urban structure reveal how the forces that shape the internal layout of cities have changed, transforming the single-center city with one dominant downtown into the polycentric metropolis with several commercial nodes.


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THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE CIVIC EXPERIENCE
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INTRODUCTION


The urban influences affecting the cultural geography of the modern world represent the end of a long evolutionary process resulting from the influences of different cultures with their goals and capabilities. A city, regardless of the culture where it develops, represents society, culture, opportunity, success, and failure. Europe and America are urbanized societies whose cities and cultures are changing within an urban environment, a condition not true in the developing world. The cities and urban places of the developing world represent the greatest challenge to traditional cultures as we approach the twenty-first century. Developing societies face the formidable task of retaining their cultural identities and traditional values in a rapidly changing world. On their success or failure rests the successful existence of much of humanity.

Two centuries ago demographers estimate less than 5 percent of the world’s population was urban*ized. Today the figure approaches 50 percent and some regional differences and changes are striking, as in such countries as Germany and Belgium where 90 percent of the population lives in cities and towns. In some parts of the world, megalopolises are evolving from formerly separate cities. In others, mega-cities are emerging with populations that exceed those of many countries. In this chapter we will discuss these regional changes and focus on several of the critical problems rapid urbanization has produced. As you will see, the problems of large cities are cross-cultural; they differ in degree, not in kind.

The Suburban City


For many decades the attraction of country life with city amenities, reinforced by the discomforts of living in the heart of many central cities, has propelled people to move to the suburbs and more distant urban fringes. Mass commuting from suburban residents to downtown workplaces was made possible in postwar times by the automobile.

As a result, the kind of suburbanization that is familiar to North Americans and other Westerners became a characteristic of urbanization in mobile, highly developed societies.

Suburban cities are not just self-sufficient, but compete with the central city for leading urban eco*nomic activities such as telecommunications, high4echnology industries, and corporate headquarters. In the current era of globalization, America’s suburban cities are proving their power to attract such activ*ities, thereby sustaining the suburbanizing process. Suburbanization has expanded the American city far into the surrounding countryside, contributing to the impoverishment of the central cities, and is having a major impact on community life.


The European City

European cities are older than North American cities, but they too were transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, industrialization struck many of Europe’s dormant medieval towns and vibrant mer*cantile cities like a landslide. But there are differences between the European experience and that of North America.

In terms of population numbers, the great European cities are in the same class as major North American cities. London, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin are megacities by world standards. These are among Europe’s historic urban centers, which have been affected but not engulfed by the industrial tide. The cities of the British Midlands and the megacities of Germany’s Ruhr are more representative of the manu*facturing era.

The industrial cities have lost much of their historical heritage, but in Europe’s largest cities the legacy of the past is better preserved. Many European cities have a Greenbelt—a zone of open country averaging up to 20 miles wide that contains scattered small towns but is otherwise open country. This has the effect of containing the built-up area and preserving near-urban open space. For this reason, European cities have not yet experienced the dispersal of their U.S. counterparts, and remain more compact and clustered. Modern CBDs have emerged near the historic cores of these cities.


Colonial Legacies

South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa share a common imprint in their colonial heri*tage. Everywhere that urbanization is occurring, there is the imprint of the colonial era alongside the tra*ditional culture. In these three realms, cities reflect their colonial beginnings as well as more recent dom*estic developments. In South and Middle America the fastest growth is where Iberian cultures dominate. Southeast Asian urban centers are growing rapidly, with foreign influences and investments continuing to play a dominant role. In Africa, the diversity caused by European influence in some, and decided lack of in others, makes it difficult to formulate a model African city that would account for all or even most of what is there.


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