Harris and Ullman's "The Nature of Cities": The Paper's Historical Context and Its Impact on Further Research

Abstract

Urban geography was dominated by the positivist tradition, an empirically based approach to social science that involved generous doses of hypothesis-testing and model-building. Urban geography was dominated by the positivist tradition, an empirically based approach to social science that involved generous doses of hypothesis-testing and model-building. Although Karl Marx himself was not especially interested in urbanism per se, Marxist theories of political economy were used to provide a framework for analyzing urban phenomena. Structural equation models integrated a number of originally disparate research traditions in economics, psychology, and sociology, and provided a powerful approach for investigating the interrelationships among a set of variables. Meanwhile, work on path analysis in sociology showed that identification could be achieved in the presence of both measurement error and simultaneous relationships. In this way, causal models, path analysis, and systems of simultaneous equations, with or without unmeasured variables, can all be subsumed under the general heading of structural equation models.