Cities & Urban Land Use - AP Human Geography

The Auto-Air-Amenity epoch runs roughly from 1920-1970. Within this epoch, the internal combustion engine transformed transportation.

The European colonial era begins with the voyage of Columbus in 1492. At this time the capital city of the Aztec Empire, called Tenochtitlan, was by most estimates the most populous city in the world. Loose estimates, which are all that are possible, place the population of Tenochtitlan at around 200,000 people.

The famous geographical work Image of the City was published by Kevin Lynch in 1960. It concerns how an individual perceives the city that they live in based on their experience of five main categories - paths, edges, districts, landmarks, and nodes.

The “central place theory” was developed in the 1930s by Walter Christaller. According to the “central place theory” in any given region there can only be one large central city which is surrounded by a series of smaller cities, towns, and hamlets. The central city provides the goods and services required by people living in surrounding communities. John R. Borchert is responsible for organizing American urbanization into five different epochs, called Borchert's Epochs. Johann von Thunen developed a model of modern agricultural land use. Alexander von Humboldt's work laid the foundation for biogeography.

In “central place theory” the outlying towns and small communities that rely on the central city for goods and services are known as “hinterlands.”

The “central place theory” states that in any given region there can only be one large central city, which is surrounded by a series of smaller cities, towns, and hamlets. The central city provides goods and services that meet the needs of the people living in the smaller communities; furthermore, the people living in the smaller communities provide part of the labor supply and market required by the city.

By definition, mercantile refers to anything of or relating to trade. A mercantile city is a trade city which developed because of the trade routes. Most of these cities benefit from being on the coast because they can have a port, but after train transportation became prominent, having a port was no longer an essential element to being a mercantile city.

By definition, a high-threshold function requires a large population to make the economic endeavor profitable; a high-range function draws people from far away to purchase the good or use the service. A cancer treatment center requires a large population since a relatively small proportion of people need cancer treatment, and a high range because it is likely that people who have cancer but live far away from the treatment center would travel further to be treated for cancer. The remaining choices are considered low range and low threshold, since ice cream shops, post offices, and department stores are more ubiquitous in cities than a cancer treatment center.

Central Place Theory assumes that people will always buy what they need in the closest place possible.

Having a high-threshold and high-range means that people will travel very far to receive the services that are provided by this particular company. Out of the options provided, people are willing to travel however far they have to, even sometimes traveling more than half-way around the world to bring their child to the best pediatric cancer-treatment center that there is. They do so because of the medical needs and medical opportunities. A family in Afghanistan might travel to Israel or to Europe to seek the medical help they need when their child is diagnosed with Cancer, or perhaps all the way to the United States.

People are not willing to travel as far for any of the other options mentioned. To go to a Walgreens Pharmacy, most people are only willing to travel within 10 miles.

To go to a coffee shop, most people in the world only have to travel 1 mile, and with coffee not being a necessity and being something you could have at home, many people do not travel at all for this service.

While employees might travel 30+ miles in order to have a good job at a technology firm, customers don't usually travel very far to receive the services provided by these companies. In fact, many people simply purchase these products online and have them shipped to their location.

Shopping malls might draw people from a bit of a distance away, but it is subject to the services provided in a particular shopping mall. For example, your typical shopping mall will only draw customers from the surrounding towns, within a 20-30 mile radius at best. However, the "Mall of America" might draw customers from over 1,000 miles away as more of a tourist destination and as a mall that offers specialized "services" such as the roller-coaster theme park within the mall. But as this again is not a necessity, people are not willing to travel as far to visit this specific mall as they are going to travel to seek services for medical needs.

The Gravity Model is based on Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation. It is a mathematical formula, so it cannot rely on something like “cultural output” because this is unquantifiable. It instead relies on population size and distance. The Gravity Model holds that the interaction between two places can be determined by the product of the population of both places, divided by the square of their distance from one another. The primary implication of this model is that distance is not the only determining factor in the interaction between two cities. For example, although Kingston, Canada is much closer to New York City than London it also has a much lower population than London so the interaction between London and New York City is likely to be higher than the interaction between Kingston and New York City.

Mexico's population distribution is an example of a primate city. Mexico City has a population that is more than double the population of Guadalajara, therefore not qualifying the population to be under a rank-size rule. Cities can be world cities, alpha cities, or capital cities and not have the population disparities found in countries like Mexico.

A “primate city” is a city that serves as by far the biggest city in the country that it inhabits. It’s population is exponentially greater than the population of the next largest city in that country. These types of cities typically arise in “postcolonial” settings because during the colonial era it was common for the European governments to carry out all their political and economic activity through one regional center. This led to infrastructure being disproportionately developed in one centralized area. After decolonization this infrastructure remained in place.

The term “primate city” is used to refer to a city that functions as by far the largest city in the country it inhabits. It may have a population between a third and a half of that of the whole country. Classic examples of primate cities include Bangkok in Thailand and Seoul in South Korea.

The rank size rule states that the largest city in a given country will have of the population of the largest city in that country. If the largest city has a population 1,000,000, and we want to know the population of the fourth largest city, it will have of the population of the largest city. of 1,000,000 is 250,000 people.

The “rank-size rule” is related to the relative size of cities. According to the rank-size rule, there should be a larger number of small cities than bigger cities. Also, this rule predicts that the larger a city’s population is then the fewer number of cities there should be in the surrounding area with a similar population.

The Transition Zone is characterized as industrial and typically dominated by manufacturing facilities. It surrounds the mainly commercial city center and is surrounded by working-class residential housing, maximizing access to markets to sell manufactured goods and housing for factory workers.

The outermost ring of the Concentric Zone Model is commuter-residential and consists mainly of low-density, estate-style housing, usually comprised of high-income professionals. Urban overcrowding is typically unappealing to people, so property values for low-density and spacious estates will be at a higher premium than higher-density urban properties.

Both the Von Thunen and Burgess models consist of a circular pattern of ring-shaped zones that are designated based upon their value, significance, and accessibility to the central business/market areas of a settlement. The Von Thunen model prioritizes perishability of goods and accessible fuel sources (lumber) to the central populated area, while the Burgess model prioritizes accessibility of labor to industrial/commercial areas. Both result in a circular, layered model.