Vance, James (1925–1999)

James E. Vance Jr. is known for his scholarship on urban, historical, and transportation geography. These interests became apparent in his doctoral dissertation on The Growth of Suburbanism West of Boston, supervised by Raymond Murphy and completed at Clark University in 1952. After holding appointments at the Universities of Arkansas, Wyoming, and Nebraska, he taught from 1958 to 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directed 28 successful doctoral dissertations. His work emphasized the evolution and structure of cities; the roles of transportation and trade in shaping regional settlement; and the social processes that internally differentiate urban areas. Vance (1990) focused especially on “urban morphogenesis—the creation and subsequent transformation of city form” (p. 38).

The popularity of Vance's courses on urban geography and transportation geography led him to write monumental textbooks on these subjects. This Scene of Man (1977) surveyed the evolving role and structure of the city in Western history. A revised edition, The Continuing City (1990), added two chapters on the modern metropolis and transportation innovations since 1850. In Capturing the Horizon (1986), Vance traced the emergence of modern transportation systems: canals, railroads, urban transport, maritime navigation, and aviation. His final book, The North American Railroad (1995), interpreted development of the railway networks of the United States and Canada, where, he argued, geographical factors dictated significant variations from British antecedents.

Vance made several influential contributions to geographic theory. First, in his work on the functional organization of the North American downtown, he argued that abstract economic forces such as land rent were insufficient to understand the structure of the central business district (CBD); instead, he stressed historic origins, functional requirements, and social factors. Vance summed up the historical-geographical processes of CBD evolution as “the seven lives of downtown: inception, exclusion, segregation, extension, replication and readjustment, redevelopment, and the city of realms.”

A second geographical contribution was the “mercantile model,” which highlighted the role of long-distance trading ties in locating early settlements around the port, transportation facilities, warehouses, markets, and so on. Intended as a critique of and alternative to Walter Christaller's central place theory, Vance's (1970, 1990) mercantile model argued that wholesale trade resulted in the formation of new settlements or “points of attachment,” which if successful became regional centers with their own hinterlands. This emphasis on commercial forces external to the local urban system, confirmed by empirical studies in North America, provided a missing link in central place theory.

A third contribution was the concept of “the city of realms,” an influential spatial model for the contemporary North American metropolis. Vance's view of the urban-realm model recognized a decentralized metropolis split into a series of daily activity areas no longer dependent for their existence on the traditional CBD. The criteria of urban realms included topography and physical geography, the overall size of the metropolis, economic functions of the realms, and the regional geography of transportation. Vance's (1977, 1990) “city of realms” predicted the contemporary dispersed metropolis a quarter century before notions of “edge cities” came into vogue.