The Classification of Municipal and Cities

In economic terms, a city as an interrelated network of economic markets, housing, labour, land, transport, and so on, situated in a limited spatial area.

Despite of fairly long history, urban development has only been in the last 100-150 years that urbanization has really gained momentum.

Miss Jacob’s thesis is that cities grew out of trading centers where nomadic hunters met with local inhabitants who were willing to trade materials and other raw materials found in the area for food and hides.

After a time, traders were attracted to the trading center and some local producers turned to buying and selling. These groups eventually combined to create a merchant class.

Reasons For Urban Growth

• Economic and non-economic factors cause the growth of a particular urban area
• The nature of existing economic opportunities in a nation is a guide to the size and character of the future urban population, level of income, consumption needs, land use, etc
• The stage of development of that nation is important, since the less potential rate of urban growth than advanced industrial countries (the latter, a high proportion of population is already urbanized)
• Increased in real income (large demand for goods and services)
• Economic opportunities improved (attract additional labour from non-urban area)

Pattern of Growth Theories

The theory of urban growth is to understand the phenomenon of urbanization.

Four theories generalizing the pattern of growth of urban land use (The Urban Research by University of Chicago) have been recognized as follows:

Concentric Zoning Theory

The work of Ernest W. Burgess and based on empirical studies of Chicago, illustrated the typical process of urban growth by a series of concentric circles expanding radially from the central business district (CBD).

It was suggested that any city extends radially from its center to form concentric zones and that, as distance from the center increased there would be a reduction in accessibility, rents and densities.

Land use would assume the following forms outwards, the central business district (CBD), a zone of transition, an area of factories and low-income housing, an area of higher income housing and a commuter zone.

Axial Development Theory

This theory represents a natural progression of thought from the previous one because accessibility to single focal points is still basic premise (e.g. as physical distance, etc).

It has extension of each types of land use along the main transport routes, especially the fastest ones. This would result in a star-shaped pattern for the urban built-up area, the numbers to the star depending on the number of main routes into town.