Associated with industrialisation in the UK in the nineteenth century The

only consistent thing about cities is that they are always changing. Classifying and
understanding the processes of urban change present problems for geographers
and others studying the city. Cities, since their inception, have always
demonstrated gradual, piecemeal change through processes of accretion, addition
or demolition. This type of change can be regarded as largely cosmetic and the
underlying processes of urbanization and the overall structure of the city remain
largely unaltered. However, at certain periods fundamentally different processes
of urbanisation have emerged; the result has been that the rate of urban change has
accelerated and new, distinctly different, urban forms have developed. This
occurred, for example, with the urbanisation.
Geographers have constantly to ask themselves whether the changes they
observe are part of the continual process of piecemeal change or whether they are
part of more fundamental processes of transformation. Just such a debate has been
occupying geographers, sociologists and other social scientists in the latter part of
the 1980s and the early 1990s. The issue of whether we are witnessing the
emergence of new types of cities has also raised questions about the adequacy and
relevance of the geographical models and theories developed in the past to
understand cities.
The earlier mention of the industrial revolution raises issues of
investigation that shape the themes of this book. Do we need to look at the
changes in, not only national, but also the international economy, since the 1970s
and ask ourselves whether or not they are as epochal in their extent and
significance as those changes now labelled the ‘industrial revolution’? The answer
to this question is unequivocally yes. There is little doubt that since the early
1970s the world economy has been affected by a number of fundamental changes.
The ramifications of these changes have been enormous and have affected, not
only the economic life, but also the social, cultural and political lives of nations,
regions, communities and individuals. Tracing the links between the changes in
the world economy and those in the landscapes, societies, economies, cultures and
politics of cities is the main aim of this book.
 Visually, the evidence of a fundamental transformation of the processes of
urbanisation appears compelling. The signs of significant change are
apparent in many urban landscapes of North America, the UK, mainland Europe
and many parts of the developing world. Some of the most widely debated of
these signs of change have been the enhancement of city centres by extensive
redevelopment, the redevelopment of derelict, formerly industrial areas such as
factories and docks (see Plate 1.1), the use of industrial and architectural heritage
in new commercial and residential developments, the social, economic and
environmental upgrading of inner-city neighbourhoods by young, middle-class
professionals, the appearance of brand-new ‘city-like’ settlements on the edges of
existing urban areas and the emergence of large areas of poverty and degradation,
for example in old inner-city areas and on council housing estates on the edges of
numerous towns and cities.
The ways in which recent changes in the urban landscape have been
reported in both the popular press and by geographers have tended to support the
notion that they represent some form of transformation. Enthusiastic local
newspapers frequently present major projects of urban regeneration as signifiers
of the transformation of a city’s fortunes, ushering in a new era of prosperity in
the service, rather than the industrial economy. In a similar manner, the language
that academics have used to debate and describe contemporary urban change
would suggest that some profound differences in the urbanisation process have
emerged. The language that academics have used to describe these changes has
included: from industrial to post-industrial, from modern to post-modern, from
Fordist to post-Fordist. However, despite apparently compelling visual evidence
and the language used to describe change, it1is important to try and remain
objective and to assess the degree to which these could truly be called a
transformation of the urbanisation process and an emergence of new forms of
urban settlement. Some of the questions that emerge from this debate include:
 How significantly has urban form being altered
 How have these changes varied geographically between different cities?
 How differently does urban life feel now? And for whom?
 This book explores these, and other, questions. It will consider the structural,
economic, political, social and cultural changes that have affected urbanisation,
primarily in the UK, but with reference to mainland Europe and North America.

Different types of cities

Many urban geographers and historians have argued that the cities that we
recognise in the 1990s are the product of a long evolutionary process, during
which the settlements of 15000 BC gradually evolved into the complex cities of
the late twentieth century. This view may seem appealing. However, it ignores
some very important dimensions of contemporary urbanisation. No two cities are
identical. They may be broadly similar, but cities have very different landscapes,
economies, cultures and societies. This is a reflection of the fact that cities are
shaped by a diverse set of processes. The particular set of processes that affect
city development depends on a number of factors that are unique to individual
cities, such as city size and the nature of its economy, and/or related to wider
factors, such as the relationships between networks of cities, the nature of the
nation within which they are located and their position within the world economy.
The diversity of city types and processes of urbanisation cannot be reduced to a
simple, linear evolutionary process. It is preferable to adopt a perspective that
recognises this diversity and to think of cities having different roles and positions
in the world economy. The trajectory of urban development is bound up with the
workings of the world economy and the relationships of individual cities to this
(Savage and Warde 1993: 38). The following classification of different types of
cities recognises this:

 Third World cities

 Cities in socialist countries
 Global (world) cities
 Older (former) industrial cities
 New industrial districts
(Savage and Warde 1993: 39–40)
This classification is not totally comprehensive, nor should it be applied
too rigidly. For example, many cities fall into more than one of the categories
listed (Savage and Warde 1993: 40). London is a global city; however, it contains
a considerable decaying industrial economy and yet it is surrounded by many new
industrial districts. It is often far from easy to determine which category describes
a city best. Further, there is a great deal of diversity within each category,
especially between Third World cities but even between older industrial cities
which might have been based upon different industries. Despite these limitations
this classification recognises that urbanisation is different in various parts of the
world and for different types of city (Savage and Warde 1993: 38–40). This book
focuses primarily on the urban geography of older industrial cities, global cities
and new industrial spaces.

Evolution of the industrial city

Cities which were formed, or in large part influenced, by the processes of

urbanisation linked to the ‘industrial revolution’ of the nineteenth century are of
relevance to a discussion of contemporary urban geography for a number of
reasons. First, such ‘industrial’ cities constitute a large part of the urban systems
of the UK, the USA and Europe. Industrialisation influenced the internal
geographies of many cities in these regions as well as the economic, political and
physical links between them. These legacies have formed important dimensions of
subsequent urbanisation. These cities are variously referred to in debate as
‘modern’ or ‘industrial’.

As well as the obvious importance of these cities to the urban geography of

older industrial nations, the industrial city has also had a disproportionate
influence on modern urban theory. The distinctive built form of the industrial city
became well known in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The dreadful
conditions that prevailed in its inner residential areas made it ripe for study by
journalists, satirists, social reporters and novelists. Novels which explored the
dark sides of these cities include Sybil: The Two Nations by Disraeli (1845),
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1848) and Hard Times by Charles Dickens
(1854); social reports included Frederick Engels’ exploration of Manchester
published in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) and Charles
Booth’s social survey of London published as Life and Labour of the People of
London (1889). The horrific images of these texts did much to form the initial
middle-class reaction to the industrial city and the lasting perceptions still present
in the 1990s.

In North America the link between urban change and the formation of urban
theory was even more direct. For much of the early twentieth century the most
influential sociology department in North America was at the newly formed
University of Chicago. The specialism of this department was urban sociology
and it was in Chicago that much of their research was conducted (Ley 1983: 22).
Some of the most famous publications of this school included Robert Park, Ernest
Burgess and R.D. McKenzie’s The City (1925), Ernest Burgess’s The Urban
Community (1926), H. Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929) and H.
Hoyt’s One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (1933). At the time
Chicago was a new city; it had grown rapidly and owed much of this growth to
industrialisation. Models of urban structure, most famously Burgess’s concentric
zone model (Figure 1.1) and Hoyt’s sector model (Figure 1.2), were based on this
research and inevitably reflected the structure of the city and the forces that
created it. The influence of these models on Mann’s (1965) model of the British
city is obvious (Figure 1.3).
 Reactions to the industrial city also shaped a number of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century traditions in the fields of political ideology, town planning and
literature (Short 1984: 14–16). The physical and intellectual legacy of the
industrial city, therefore, is hard to ignore.

The most immediately striking aspects of the industrial city were the
extent to which they revolutionised the urban systems of the UK and the USA and
the speed at which this took place. In Britain, for example, in 1800 only one city,
London, exceeded 100 000 people; however, by 1891 the total was 24 (Ley 1983:
20). Growth figures for individual cities reveal the rapidity of this urbanisation
(Table 1.1).

In the USA this process occurred some fifty to sixty years later. Its effects
were none the less fundamental. In both the UK and USA the focus of their urban
systems shifted away from previous political, religious or mercantile centres
towards manufacturing centres. Sources of cheap energy, first water and later
coal, acted as strong magnets for this growth, coupled with the accessibility
offered by rivers and other waterways such as lakes.

Not only were the size and rapidity of growth of these cities new but so
also were the forces that shaped this growth. The growth of the industrial city was
tied to the development of the factory system within the emergent form of
industrial capitalism. The ability of industry to outbid other uses for land near the
centres of cities was fundamental to the generalised form of the industrial city
portrayed in contemporary accounts and urban models. The cores of industrial
cities remained largely commercial, a land-use that was able to outbid all others
for this expensive accessible land. However, surrounding this core was typically a
ring of industry, which required a large labour force housed nearby, leading to the
development of a ring of working-class housing surrounding this. The regulation
of this residential development was non-existent until the late nineteenth century
in many industrial cities. Systems of urban government were archaic, based on the
parish system, and more suited to the administration of rural areas or small urban
areas. Consequently, they were totally overwhelmed by the scale of urbanisation
during the nineteenth century. The quality of the housing in this zone was
extremely poor and the provision of services and utilities such as running water,
lighting and sanitation was frequently nil. These zones became notorious for
outbreaks of lawlessness and disease initiating a series of ‘moral panics’ among
the wealthier middleclasses. These reactions to the zones of new working-class
housing were fundamental to the desire of the middle classes to move away from
the centre of cities into the expanding suburbs, a desire facilitated by progressive
transport innovation.
 Despite the theoretical importance afforded to both Manchester and
Chicago they were not typical of the industrial city. Rather, these two cities were
the ‘shock’ cities of industrialisation. They represented extremes where an
industrial urban form became most developed and complete. In other cities
industrialisation was mediated by local conditions, the legacy, be it physical or
otherwise, of earlier rounds of urbanisation. In many cases the transformation of
urban form by industrialisation was partial rather than total, mixed in with earlier
urban forms, or the form of industrialisation differed from the norm. In
Birmingham, for example, initial mass industrialisation was concentrated in small
workshops rather than factories. It was not until the early twentieth century that
the factory system came to dominate. Further, Birmingham’s urban form was
disrupted by a complex patchwork of land-ownership patterns which determined
land-uses as much as the forces of industrialisation did.