Urban Geography

Origins and Growth of Urban Geography

The emergence of urban geography can be traced back to 19th-century discussions of urban origins and growth. The early emphasis on the site and situation of settlements and their role as centers of civilization was linked to geographers’ overarching interest in the relation of humans to their physical environment. This abiding concern with excavating the rise of cities and the role of environmental conditions—whether physiographic or climatic—in shaping society reflected the broader disciplinary concerns of early geographers in arriving at scientific explanations that bridged the gap between the physical sciences [Page 2936]and the incipient social sciences. It also hinged on an ultimately flawed reliance on assumptions that the natural environment exerted a determining influence on human society and behavior, as well as on the structure, form, and function of its spatial arrangements. In effect, such geographers would argue that the site of a city determines—not merely influences—the prospects of its social development and economic growth. Two of the more prominent figures in this particular perspective were the American geographers Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington. Their work and that of their colleagues was challenged in the 1920s as overly simplistic and deterministic. The debunking of environmental determinism acted as a dead end for the sort of human-environment work that had emerged in the early decades of geography's disciplinary development and that had definitively moved urban geography into a different direction altogether.

Early on, the environmental-determinist paradigm was matched in popularity by a growing interest in the regional patterns of settlement and in the classification of urban structure, form, and function. Early works such as Frederick Emerson's 1907 study, A Geographical Interpretation of New York, or Almon E. Parkins's 1918 volume, The Historical Geography of Detroit, were among the founding texts of this particular tradition in urban geography. In most cases, copious descriptive information was compiled with little attempt made to offer anything more analytical. This empiricist paradigm, too, was ultimately inadequate in providing a sustained analytical framework because of its inherent limitations as an almost exclusively descriptive approach. Nevertheless, the regional description paradigm served the discipline well in preparing the way for more analytically refined approaches that shifted the focus of geographical inquiry from the environment alone to socioeconomic conditions and their spatial patterns.

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