Envisioning and Experience

Diagram

Many high school or second level students first encounter urban geography through particular kinds of line drawings or diagrams. Generations of students – including some of the contributors to this book – learned about the spatial pattern of cities through exposure to three diagrammatic representations of the city used by Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman (1945) in their now classic article on concentric-zone, sector and multiple nuclei models of urban growth (see figure 3.1.1). Even if Harris and Ullman's models have been critiqued and revised, the technique of diagrammatic representation upon which they depend remains central to the teaching and learning of urban geography: most introductory textbooks about urban geography will contain a range of similar renderings of urban ...