Towns of the Edinburgh-Glasgow Region, Their Tradition and Fuutre

Abstract

This article is the first step for the author's World regional study of cities. It will cover the regional side, besides his “Researches in Urban Geography” published in 1951 which dealt with systematic aspects.The author has visited United Kingdom to participate in, the I. G. U. meeting in 1964. This is the result of the Urban Geographical Symposium held at Edinburgh and its related excursions.At first, the general characters of British urban studies are briefly reviewed. Scotland is situated out of the European Continental and South British Metropolitan Region; though she has many difficult economic conditions, Glasgow has felt over-crowdedness, which would be solved by decentralizing industries. Another important project is to establish New Towns to attract new industries. They are different procedures, compared with Japanese regional development. In this region, traditional towns are well preserved. As for examples, Alnwick, which Prof. Conzen studied well, and Edinburgh are described. The author has analysed Edinburgh's structure, considering location, historical development, function, and house density which was calculated on the one inch-map, with meshes of 500 metres (Fig. 1). Density is the highest around older centres, and most new corporate housing estated are distributed in areas with density less than 5/10.