Progress reports

Urban geography:
the internal structure of cities
by J.W.R. Whitehand

In the past year (1982/83) philosophical and methodological debates, despite

their continuance in geography's major English language journals on both sides of
the Atlantic (Chouinard and Fincher, 1983; Robinson, 1983) have with rare excep­
tions (Cullen and Knox, 1982) constituted little more than undercurrents in geo­
graphical research on the internal structure of cities. The distinctiveness of method­
ological developments on either side of the main language divides must, of course,
be borne in mind, and the reflections of Pumain et al. (1983) on the comparatively
recent rise of quantitative analysis in French urban geography are a salutary
reminder of this. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to describe the main body of
geographical research into intraurban phenomena as continuing to be essentially
empirical, with case studies being prominent and connections with theory tending
to be loose but by no means insignificant. It is appropriate therefore to structure
this review in terms of the subject matter of research, offering a brief comment on
philosophical and methodological matters at the end. Most research within the
period reviewed (mid-1982 to mid-1983, but occasionally reaching back slightly
earlier) can be grouped under one or more fairly familiar heads: the inner city,
residential mobility and segregation, the CBD, retailing, morphology, and con­
servation.
The inner city has retained its position as the part of the urban area to attract
most research, although the nature of that research has varied a good deal. A crude
96 Urban geography: the internal structure of cities

division can be made into those studies in which the inner city is viewed as an area
of deprivation and those in which it is seen as an area of regeneration, or as it is
widely but inaptly termed, 'gentrification'. In the first category, though resting
rather uneasily there, the most wide-ranging historically and in some ways the most
penetrating study is the examination of the American ghetto by Ward (1982).
This reveals that the fluidity or rigidity of the ethnic division of labour created
markedly different conditions of employment during each of the major waves of
migration to American cities, making the ghetto sometimes a 'cul-de-sac' for immi­
grants and sometimes an 'elevator' for their advancement. In a quite different vein,
Hamnett (1983a) takes a snapshot of unemployment in England's inner cities in
1981 and its association with other forms of deprivation. To these studies should
be added research of a more familiar sort on the influence of the withholding of
credit by loan agencies (Kantor and Nystuen, 1982), the inner cities of Manchester
and Salford emerging as areas of low mortgage allocation (Grime and Smith, 1982),
but little evidence being found in Perth, Australia of discrimination by building
societies on the basis of occupation, ethnicity or house location (Jackson, 1982).
The second category of inner-city studies may be divided into the few that are
concerned primarily with the developers and other agencies involved in the renewal
process and the many that are concerned largely with the characteristics of the
households occupying and vacating the areas being renewed. In the minority group,
the contribution of Lauria (1982) is in a large part an extension of the work of
Smith (1979), which builds on the work of Harvey (1973). Smith, whose ideas are
of importance for an understanding of a much wider area than just the inner city
(see particularly Smith, 1982), emphasizes the significance of the difference
between potential and actual (or 'capitalized') ground rent in determining whether
inner-city redevelopment proves attractive to private enterprise. Lauria elaborates
the role of state intervention and community organizations using unpaid labour (see
also Johnson, 1983), which makes redevelopment possible when it is not profitable
for private enterprise, thereby causing a widening of the gap between potential and
actual ground rent in adjoining areas and making their redevelopment more profit­
able. The studies of households are, not surprisingly, much more empirical. Naroff
and Liro (1982) report that recent purchasers of dwellings in the 'central city' have
significantly higher incomes than existing owner occupiers and tend to be younger
than the population of the city as a whole. Phipps (1982) examines households
involved in the countermovement out of the inner city of Saskatoon and concludes,
though stressing the problems of obtaining a representative sample, that the large
majority preferred their new home to their inner-city home. Logan (1982), while
also emphasizing research problems (particularly relating to methods, sources, and
terminology) in his study of inner Melbourne, reveals the increasing occupational
status of not only owner occupiers but also of tenants. Harrison (1983) adds yet
more grist to the mill, revealing that middle and upper-income groups moving into
a working-class neighbourhood in the inner area of Knoxville, Tennessee came from
Knoxville or another city rather than from the suburbs. Fortunately, there are
signs that the problems of codification and assimilation presented by these studies
 /. W. R. Whitehand 97

and their predecessors are being recognized and most recently Hamnett (1983b)
has gone some way towards integrating the literature from both sides of the
Atlantic, as well as providing information on the recent increases in both social
status and owner occupation in parts of inner London.
Quite apart from the inner city, an interest in residential mobility more generally
is of long standing, and continues to generate a variety of research. Maher (1982)
examines the nature and effects of population turnover in Australia's major cities
and, in particular, shows the significance of population flows in determining the
composition of small areas of the city and the nature of the changes occurring
within them. Cadwallader (1982) models spatial variations in residential mobility
rates in Portland, Oregon, using a simultaneous equations approach, and high­
lights the fact that mobility rates are both a cause of and a consequence of neigh­
bourhood characteristics. Using a simulation game, Phipps (1983) examines the
residential search process and, in particular, the changes in the individual's assess­
ment of alternatives in the course of his search. Clark and Onaka (1983) develop a
typology of reasons for residential mobility, emphasizing the significance of the
household life cycle and dissatisfaction with housing. Finally, Miron (1983)
presents, and applies to Toronto, a model of the movement of households within
the city which is similar to a Markovian model of residential relocation, although a
major difference is that the net movement of households into each geographical
zone is balanced against changes in the stock of housing in each zone.
These studies of intraurban population mobility should be viewed against a
background of studies of suburbanization (Steinnes, 1982) and decentralization
(Keinath, 1982) in the United States, counterurbanization in England and Wales
(Robert and Randolph, 1983) and an attempt to differentiate empirically between
cities and suburbs in the United States in terms of the demographic and socio­
economic characteristics of the population, the characteristics of the housing stock
and the nature of the economic activity (Gober and Behr, 1982). This last-mentioned
study reveals that the only respect in which suburbs and cities are consistently
distinguished from one another is in their proportions of black and hispanic resi­
dents.
Studies of residential segregation by both geographers (Mik, 1983) and sociolo­
gists (Farley, 1983) continue to abound, and the topic arises in the discussion of
various other phenomena, such as unemployment (Forster, 1983). The sheer
number of studies that have accumulated over recent years has caused van Amers-
foort (1983) to call upon the new Park and Burgess to reveal themselves and
provide a monograph that will clarify the state of their art. The tendency for the
topic to be projected back into the nineteenth century continues (Barke and
Johnson, 1982) and already, if we are to judge from a historian's view (Cannadine,
1982), the confusion about residential segregation in that era is as great as it is
about its modern counterpart. The antecedents of the phenomenon are clearly
beyond the historical ken of most geographers, but Christopher (1983) traces it as
far as the early European colonial city, giving special attention to South Africa.
An even longer-established research interest, the CBD, remains in the relative
98 Urban geography: the internal structure of cities

obscurity to which it was relegated in the 1970s, although there have been several
contributions in the French language journals (Pallier, 1982; Palu, 1982; Takahashi
et al., 1982). Two major exceptions in the English language, both forward looking,
are the work of Edgington (1982a; 1982b) and an interdisciplinary symposium on
the future of the city centre to which several geographers contributed (Davies and
Champion, 1983). Both devote considerable attention to the role of the CBD in
relation to both other urban areas and extraurban areas. The first, drawing upon a
number of previous studies including the author's own of Melbourne, concludes
that, rather than focusing on the traditional issues, such as urban rent and the
accessibility of central areas, greater attention should be paid to those processes
operating within the CBD that stem from a much larger environment. This work
thus provides both a useful review and a potential link with the studies of decentral­
ization and counterurbanization already referred to. The symposium offers a
fuller view, but generally consistent with that of Edgington, anticipating that
changes in the relationship between the city centre and other areas will bring it
back to the forefront of public concern (Champion, 1983). However, while the
processes at work may increasingly involve national and international relationships,
the scale at which most of those who use the CBD perceive it is that of the func­
tional subarea, the street and the building, and there are signs that as the CBD
returns to a more central position in the research arena a morphological component
to this research will be essential (Whitehand, 1983).
Research on retailing has also been affected by the tendency for the geographical
scale of relationships to become enlarged. But the Register of members' research
interests recently issued by the Urban Geography Study Group of the Institute of
British Geographers would suggest that interest in it remains undiminished,
although this is perhaps not fully reflected in the quantity of papers published in
the past year. Among the aspects considered have been retail 'blight', especially in
planned shopping precincts (Marcus, 1983), the cognition of retailing environments
by entrepreneurs (Halperin et al., 1983), changes in retailing in the city centre
(Thorpe, 1983) and retail development in the inner city (Pacione, 1982) and there
has been a wide-ranging review by a group of French-speaking geographers (includ­
ing Beaujeu-Garnier, 1982; Bize, 1982; Me'renne-Schoumaker, 1982; Metton,
1982;Troin, 1982).
Despite the increasing concern within the mainstream of urban geography
with relationships of a geographical scale larger than the individual urban area, a
sizable research literature has continued to accumulate on urban morphology,
although studies primarily concerned with land use (Elbow, 1983) are now in a
minority. Arguably, there are signs of a resurgence of morphological research that
may contain within it a potential counterpoise to the centrifugal tendencies that
have spread urban geographers thinly over a research frontier that at times in the
1970s became only tenuously connected to the city as a physical entity. This
research on the physical form of urban areas is, however, disparate and hard to
codify. In the score or so of papers published in the national and international
serials during the past year, generating between them over 500 citations, it is
 /. W. R. Whitehand 99

exceedingly rare to find a paper that is referred to by more than one author. This
reflects the continuing tendency for much of this literature to be rather narrowly
concerned with particular cities, countries and historical periods, or to refer to the
literature of only one or two of the several relevant cognate disciplines. Thus, for
example, the comparison by Mittelstadt (1982) of the Unter den Linden in East
Berlin and the Ludwigstrasse in Munich refers exclusively to the German language
literature, Winters (1982) in his study of urban morphogenesis in French-speaking
black Africa refers largely to the literature on Africa, most of it in French, and
Curtis (1982) in his study of Art Deco architecture in Miami Beach refers almost
exclusively to publications by American historians of art and/or architecture.
Nevertheless, there is also an urban morphological literature that is set within a
much wider frame of reference. Knox (1982), for example, brings together the
work of geographers, sociologists, architects and others in discussing the elements
that require inclusion in a theory of the built environment. Olson (1982)
ambitiously draws on an extensive range of North American literature (especially
in economics, economic history and economic geography) to construct a model of
urban morphogenesis based on a biological analogy. Yet, wide-ranging though
their papers are in some respects, both Knox and Olson offer perspectives that
are almost entirely lacking in reference to the sizeable British and German literature
on urban morphogenesis, and a historian (Borsay, 1982) writing on the English
urban landscape, albeit primarily for fellow historians, refers to scarcely any of
the geographical literature.
This is not to say that recent urban morphological research is entirely without
common ground. Springett (1982) and Rodger (1982), working on the urban
land market are arguably members of the same 'invisible college', although as far
as the nineteenth-century land market is concerned one envisages a more free
market and the other a less free market as the century progressed. These con­
clusions are not, however, contradictory if set in context.
Four other aspects of the urban morphological liturature deserve brief mention.
First, there is the review by von der Dollen (1982) of central European research
and its still rather rare, but growing, conceptual links with British research, the
most notable of which, the fringe-belt concept (von der Dollen, 1983), has per­
meated into the education literature (Barke, 1982). Secondly, there are two mor­
phological studies within the rapidly growing field of planning history (Freestone,
1982; Wood, 1982). Thirdly, two contributions by economists, one on the relation­
ship between the rates of population growth and building replacement (Brueckner,
1982), and the other incorporating the supply of land into land-market theory
(Evans, 1983) are both important for geographers who lay stress on the economic
determinants of urban form. Finally, historical urban morphology is showing signs
of spilling over into urban history, with geographers providing the bulk of the
content of the third volume in a new urban history series (Thompson, 1982).
It is a short step from urban morphology, particularly in the German genetic
tradition (Achenbach, 1982), to preservation of the townscape (Kearns, 1982)
and conservation (Slater, 1982), although the obstacles to achieving a theory of
100 Urban geography: the internal structure of cities

urban landscape management (Conzen, 1981; Whitehand, 1981,142—44) have yet

to be surmounted. In the face of ill-informed attacks (Price, 1981) it is important
that rapid progress is made towards this end.
Most of the past year's contributions concentrate on a particular aspect of city
structure, be it an area of the city, a process, a group of decision makers, or some
part of the city's fabric or organization. Aplin (1982) is unusually ambitious in
attempting to develop a model of the entire phenomenon of urban change, albeit
for only a few decades in the middle of the nineteenth century. The singularity
of his paper serves to reinforce the need for integration in other fields dealt with in
this review. This task requires not only an element of stocktaking but also in the
current uncertain situation a more than usual amount of forward vision. In the
English-speaking countries geographical research on the internal structure of cities
would seem to have been poised for several years now at a philosophical and
methodological watershed. It is therefore an opportune moment for those who
care for the future to make their voices heard. The seemingly old-fashioned appeal
by Jones (1983) for a more concerted examination of the links between theory and
data,'the systematic comparison of cases and a renewed concern for rigour is timely
at a moment of methodological indecision. Coming as it does from a political
scientist invited into a gathering of urban geographers gives it added significance.
Philosophically, a major issue on which urban geographers have tended to mark
time is bound up with the subject matter with which research is concerned. In­
fluences from outside geography have made the internal structure of the city less
clearly within the mainstream of research than it was a decade ago. Increasing
attention has been given to national or even international urban systems, especially
to the study of organizations, both public and private. This is a field populated in
part by researchers who have defected from the ranks of traditional urban geo­
graphy. The response by the 'old school' to this fissiparous tendency continues to
be vigorous in terms of the sheer number of papers published, as this review shows,
though not without some evidence of uncertainty in the grasp of long-term values.
It is important to ensure that research on the organizations and the organizational
structures by which cities are maintained does not lose touch with the study of the
city itself.

Department of Geography, University of Birmingham, UK

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