Role Of Cities Research Articles

BOOK REVIEW: Jordanna Bailkin.THE CULTURE OF PROPERTY: THE CRISIS OF LIBERALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN. and David Wayne Thomas.CULTIVATING VICTORIANS: LIBERAL CULTURE AND THE AESTHETIC.

Reviewed by: The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, and: Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic Jonah Siegel (bio) The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, by Jordanna Bailkin; pp. xii + 320. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, $35.00, £24.50. Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic, by David Wayne Thomas; pp. xv + 229. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, $45.00. Each of these studies may be recommended as a soft-spoken yet effective corrective to influential ideas of liberal values that have been more often assumed than clearly established. While Jordanna Bailkin complicates notions of property, especially cultural property, in relation to dominant and subordinate groups, David Wayne Thomas attempts to engage the frequently unspoken, but nevertheless influential notion that the cultivation of the individual is best understood as a mystified subjugation of the self quite contrary to the aspiration for individual autonomy with which it is often associated. While we have become accustomed to simple assertions of the essentially political nature of all aesthetic controversies, Jordanna Bailkin offers an incontestable and extremely interesting version of the relationship. Indeed, the underlying question driving her project is compelling: what might the idea of cultural property, of material that cannot be disposed of according to the individual will, do to a politics, like that of Britain, that has relied so heavily on the support of property rights for its validation? Bailkin, like Thomas, has a surprising amount on the table. Her goal is not simply to trace to earlier sources an intersection of ethics and ownership that can seem so characteristic of the twentieth century, but to do so in order "to illuminate the crisis of Liberal ideals and practices" in Britain before the First World War (1). The vexed nature of the idea of cultural property is developed most compellingly in the course of Bailkin's rich and textured discussion of the disposition of a quantity of Celtic gold found in a field in Ireland in 1896 and sold to the British Museum. Bailkin traces the debate over the "return" of the material—not to the person who unearthed it or to the person on whose property it was found, or even to the area where it was discovered (Derry), but to the Dublin Museum of Science and Art. As in her discussion of the National Gallery of Scotland—though she is commendably nuanced in her treatment of regional difference—Bailkin's analysis illustrates the paradoxes bound to emerge when concepts of national identity clash with the political fact of Union. Ultimately, the gold is indeed "returned" to a place it had never been before, which might seem a sort of nationalist victory but for the fact that the restitution is carried out as a magnanimous act of King Edward, so in that sense it validates, rather than contradicts, imperial rule. As this instance will indicate, Bailkin's exposition is detailed and subtle. As such, it allows her to identify important ancillary developments, such as the influence of this particular controversy on the emergence of popular ideas of Celtic art. The treatment of the National Gallery of Scotland, though it does not have quite so colorful a crisis to build on, similarly dwells on the complex problem of national identity, national stereotype, and art. Was the function of the gallery in Edinburgh to mark the city's role as a center of culture—and therefore to offer a selection of European masterpieces—or was it somehow to mark itself as distinctly Scottish? If the latter, what might it mean to be Scottish, [End Page 309] and how might a symbol of Scottish identity, however constituted, validate itself when its funding was provided by England? A key instance in the book is the duke of Norfolk's announced sale in 1909 of Hans Holbein's Christina of Denmark (1538), a work that since 1880 had been on loan to the National Gallery in London, and which it was feared would be purchased by a deep- pocketed American. As Bailkin demonstrates, two versions of liberalism clashed in the debate the sale provoked; the traditional liberal commitment to...

Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City by Norman s> Davies Roger Moorhouse (review)

348 SEER, 8i, 2, 2003 Davies, Norman and Moorhouse, Roger. Microcosm: Portrait ofa Central European City.Jonathan Cape, London, 2002. xix + 585 pp. Illustrations.Maps. Appendices. Notes. Index. ?20.00. THE city in question has been known under many guises, although three versions stand out: its early Latinized name is 'Vratislavia';its more widely known German name was, and is 'Breslau';in Polish it is 'Wroclaw',which has also been its official name since 1945. It lies on the river Oder or Odra, and is historicallythe chief city of Lower Silesia. In I939 the largestGerman city east of Berlin(with629,000 inhabitants),it sufferedterribledevastationin 1945 and was the largestEuropean city to experience the wholesale exchange of its ethnic-culturalidentity as a resultof the Second WorldWar. Today, in termsof population, it is the fourthcity of Poland. During its thousand-yearhistorythe city and its region have been exposed to and have shared in many of the complex developments that have shaped this part of Europe: migrations and settlements, especially Germanic and Slavonic, but alsoJewish; the coming and going of weak national states and the absorptionof the areain largedynasticempires;and finally,the experience of a double dose of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. For Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse the city thereforerepresentsCentral Europe in miniature hence the title of the book. Their history of the city is a great achievement in terms of its wealth of detail, its wide range of sources, its breadth of perspective,itsvivid narrative,and itsperceptivejudgements. And although each of the chronological chapters follows a similar formulaic pattern, the book is highly readable, and the last two chapters, covering the years I9I8-2000, almost compulsively so. In places the book's grandeur of scalelends it something of an epic quality. Davies and Moorhouse succeed in their proclaimed main objectives: to overcome the German-Polish historiographical rivalry that has bedevilled much of the analysisof the city'spast;to identifythe city'snumerouschanging political and cultural connections; and to examine the city's historywithin a regional and a wider European context. Their multinational focus and their rejection of exclusive nationalistinterpretationsreflectnot only the European ethos of our own day but also do historicaljustice to the rich past of the city and of its Silesianhinterland. The book is not entirely chronological, for the prologue casts the reader into the drama of the city during the eighty-day Soviet siege of 'Festung Breslau'in 1945. Afterthe harrowingaccount of the death of GermanBreslau, the readeris whiskedaway in chapter one, as if in a flash-back,to a surveyof the city'searliestbeginnings;it appearsthat its Slavonic name originatesfrom that of the Czech prince VratislavI who reigned in 9I 5-92 I. Thereafter the authors deploy different forms of the city's name in each of the successive chapters to illustratethe problem of the city's changing identity under Piast Polish, Czech/Bohemian, Habsburg, Prussian, German, and again Polish rule. The authors skilfullyweave into each chapter sections on regional and wider Europeanpolitical developments;on the city's economic life and social conditions;on religious,cultural,and ethnic changes;on the city'sadministration and civic events;and on itsbuildingsand physicalappearance. REVIEWS 349 There is much in the book for both the specialist historian and for the general reader interested in Europe's past. Topics worth highlighting for the medieval period include the Christianization of Slavonic Silesia; Silesia's complex relationship with Piast Poland; the beginnings and character of German settlement; the Mongol invasion of I241; the city's role during the Hussite wars; and the impact of natural disasters and attitudes towards witchcraft. Forthe early modern period the following stand out: the city as a bastion of Lutheranism yet its lenient treatment by the Roman Catholic Habsburgs; Silesia's economic and cultural eminence within the Habsburg monarchy (I526-I740); and the wars waged for Silesia by Frederick II of Prussia.Forthe nineteenth centurythe authorsofferparticularinsightinto the city's role during the wars againstNapoleon (theOrder of the Iron Crosswas created here in I8I 3) and the revolutions of I848, and as hotbed of German liberal and socialist thought; its increasinglycosmopolitan and multi-denominational character; its participation in the industrialization of Prussia (by 19I3 Breslau was Europe's largest producer of railway...

Diverging Memories? Durs Grunbein's Mnemonic Topographies and the Future of the German Past

While walking the streets of Berlin these days, one can clearly observe the last visible remains of WWII and the Cold War years gradually vanishing from sight: bullet holes, smoke-blackened buildings, and rubble give way to restored classicist palaces, while new buildings ornamented with steel and glass emerge on every corner. While the war and the years that followed remain, in Reinhart Koselleck's term, an always-- present Zeitschicht of Berlin's visual palimpsest, they nevertheless seem to drift into oblivion.1 Only rarely does the lurking past shimmer through the facades of the old-new German capital, calling to mind the interdependency linking its past, present, and possible future. Berlin's topography is currently being rewritten according to the city's central role in Germany's new self-image and its unique position in Europe's reawakening middle. Yet, Berlin's new topography-the visual result of fierce artistic and political debates-represents only one result of the much larger process of what Andreas Huyssen has called rethinking German nation, or, as I would phrase it, discussing alternative future German narratives, that is historical, political, and cultural conceptions and representations of the German past (74). Indeed, the disputes over the future of the German history haven't ceased for a moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the changing political map, the growing distance from the era of National Socialism, and the increasing integration of those born after 1945 into the cultural and public arena, the chain of public disputes over alternative narratives of the past seems unbreakable: The quarrel over the Gulf War and Germany's responsibility for helping to create Sadam Hussein's war machine was followed by the debate over Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. The argument surrounding the publication of the Black Book of Communist atrocities paved the way for the continuous dispute over the so-called Wehrmacht crimes exhibition. The seemingly endless commemorating events on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII in and around 1995 were followed by the thorny question of whether Germans in uniform should return to the Balkans, this time as protectors of human rights. After the ferocious conflict over Martin Walser's attack on the instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory in his 1998 Peace Prize speech, came the dispute over Peter Sloterdijk's Menschenpark-did he really plead, in a post-Nietzschean manner, for the breeding of nonviolent human beings? That was soon to be succeeded by the recent controversies over German Leitkultur and the caesura 1968.2 Indeed, all these debates-and I certainly didn't mention all of them-can be explained within their immediate contexts. Yet they simultaneously pose variations on one overarching question: namely, how to tell about the past in the future, and what discursive consequences each and every story, each and every history, would have.3 One debate in particular, though-over the planned Holocaust Memorial in Berlin-- seems to have posed this question more than others and thus has attracted the most public attention in Germany and abroad.4 The reason for this lies at hand: Once built, the German national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin will visually embody the symbolic space of the past, of the Holocaust, in the nation's self-image. To be sure, what shaped the course of this intense conflict was not solely the issue of which of the mostly pretentious proposals should be realized. Rather, the debate was fueled by the kind of discursive suggestions that different artistic choices would have. The proposed location of the memorial was of crucial importance in this respect. It was clear that the erection of the memorial at the corner of Ebert and Behrens Streets-in the heart of German political and cultural activity--denotes, as James Young pointed out, the relationship between the postreunification German nation to the memory of the Nazi crimes (Young 7, 184-223). …

Globalising Kuala Lumpur and the Strategic Role of the Producer Services Sector

In the context of the international economy of the late 1970s, the Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan (1984) noted that the city's role as the commercial and financial centre of Malaysia would be maintained and enhanced. With intensifying globalisation processes in the 1990s and the coming of the new millennium, fresh approaches and innovative strategies relating to further tertiarisation in the urban economy have to be instituted. The paper argues that this sector has not yet distinctly disarticulated from that of goods production in or beyond the city limits. This raises a serious question whether producer services could support Kuala Lumpur's quest for 'world city' status by the year 2020.

London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775-1825. By David Barnett, A History of London. By Stephen Inwood, Restoration London: From Poverty to Pets, From Medicine to Magic, From Slang to Sex, From Wallpaper to Women's Rights. By Liza Picard and London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. By Jonathan Schneer

That four Londons are reviewed in this essay calls attention to the popularity of the topic, yet they represent only a few of the most recent publications. Each work touches variously on the city, as its title suggests. Inwoods's, a well-documented narrative, is a general up-date in accord with the latest scholarship. Barnett reinterprets the city's role during the Industrial Revolution, emphasizing that the metropolis did not play second-fiddle to the great Midlands' cities. Schneer captures the aura of imperial London at the dawn of a new century, exactly a hundred years ago. Finally, Picard's is a delightful vignette of Restoration life with lots of delicious anecdotes. That London history today is enjoying a renaissance speaks well for the city's continued resilience as well as its mystique. Each work reviewed here makes its special contribution to both.

Antwerp artists and the practice of painting on copper

Artistic activity in Antwerp around 1600 is explored in the context of the city's role in the international copper trade and print publishing. The physical characteristics of copper plates used by Antwerp artists such as Brueghel and his contemporaries are discussed, as well as the painting techniques employed.

Urban leviathan: Mexico City in the twentieth century

List of Abbreviations Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Laying the Foundations 2. The Urban Terrain of Postrevolutionary State Building, 1910-1929 3. Mexico City Governance and the Move Toward Corporatism, 1929-1943 4. Balancing Party Sectors Through Urban Administration, 1944-1958 5. The PRI at the Crossroads: Urban Conflict Splits the Party, 1958-1966 6. Rethinking Mexico City's Role in National Development, 1966-1973 7. From Urban to National Fiscal Crisis, 1973-1982 8. Urban Democratic Reform as Challenge to Corporatist Politics, 1982-1988 9. Recasting the Dynamics of Urban and Political Change in Mexico Appendixes Notes Bibliography Index

Finance and capitalism: the City's imperial role yesterday and today

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Building a future on the past: The cultural image of Niš region

Abstract A consciously‐created regional cultural image can play the role of an active actor in economic development. This is illustrated by the example of Nis in Serbia, which had been faced with the negative consequences of Belgrade's hypermetropolitanization. The regional cultural image which is being projected is based on the city's role in Serbian high culture and selective use of regional history. Connections with the Roman period are emphasized, while those which emphasize the city's provinciality—the medieval and Turkish—are underplayed. This symbolic instrumentalization contributes to a positive regional image and to regional integration.

SINGAPORE RISING: The Services Dimension*

Singapore's export‐services upgrading experiment can perhaps be better viewed as a bid to shift from a branch‐plant to a regional‐headquarters role for multi‐national corporations (MNCs). More generally, a survey of service‐based development possibilities suggests a similar conclusion for other world cities as well. What might appear at the local level to be autonomous export‐ or producer‐services activity may instead reflect the city's role in the corporate networks that coordinate global manufacturing. The upshot is the prospect of a multi‐polar East Asian industrial landscape. Coordination and control are likely to radiate not only from Tokyo, Seoul, and post‐1997 Hong Kong, but also from Singapore — an advanced communications enclave ideally suited to MNCs administering the emerging factory systems of such Little Tigers as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Real Estate Tax Delinquency: Private Disinvestment and Public Response

Real estate tax delinquency is emerging as a major component of the urban fiscal crisis, affecting cities as diverse as Houston, Pittsburgh, New York, and Atlanta. A large and increasing proportion of uncollected taxes wreak havoc with any city's budgetary and planning process. Even more important, a growing rate of tax delinquency is symptomatic of fundamental changes in the role of the city in the American political economy. This study examines tax delinquency as a component of the flight of private capital from the central city. Delinquency trends in forty-eight cities over a twenty-five-year period are analyzed to set the national context, and an in-depth case study examines the problem at the neighborhood level. Interviews with 158 delinquent property owners uncover the reasoning behind the delinquency decision. Public policy options are evaluated in light of the severe practical and ideological limitations on public response to private disinvestment. Lake provides a brief survey of the available literature on tax delinquency, at both city-wide and neighborhood scales, focusing on the change in emphasis over time from a concern with administrative remedies to a search for systemic solutions. An overview of housing and demographic trends affecting the City of Pittsburgh in recent years is examined in depth. Lake surveys property owners to delve into the behavior of delinquent owners and concludes with discussing the City's role and implications for policy. Improving the situation is considered in terms of avoiding the conditions that lead to delinquency, and improving the city's capability of administering parcels acquired through tax-taking mechanisms.

Twentieth century urban growth: an ecological approach.

Abstract This research involves a longitudinal analysis of a large number of urban areas for two distinct historical periods during the Twentieth Century. The study indicates that while human ecology's general assumption that sustenance activity regulates community growth is correct, the theory overemphasizes the role of industrial capacity in this process. Growth appears to be more a function of a community's managerial activity than its production capacity. Basic-non-basic activity theory fails to predict a community's growth potential. Nevertheless one aspect of sustenance activity, the city's role in coordinating goods and services flows, has a significant impact on growth. Several other ecological variables, region and the extent of transportation activity, influence urban growth. Yet none of these factors show consistent relationships with growth through time.

Latin American Intellectuals and the City, 1860–1940

Given the historic role of cities in Latin America as an instrument for appropriating territory and for ordering society, one may wonder why more attention is not paid to the Latin Americans' own vision of the city. We are sometimes asked to believe that only in the 1940s did the urban phenomenon loom in their world and that our knowledge of it comes from foreign demographers and anthropologists. Colonial sources like Solórzano and theRecopilación, however, demonstrate that the IberoCatholic political tradition gives central importance to the organizational and paradigmatic functions of the urban unit. After independence, to be sure, this tradition was eclipsed by the ‘ruralization’ of Latin American societies as urban, bureaucratic structures decayed and power flowed to the agrarian domain. At this time also, intellectual horizons opened to offer release from scholastic constraints, encouraging the intelligentsia to make eclectic, sometimes euphoric assessments of their new nations' future potential. Of thesepensadoresSarmiento almost alone dealt directly with the city's role in nation building. Yet his very plea that the city — whether Buenos Aires or a new ‘Argirópolis’ — assume ‘modernizing’ or ‘developmental‘functions reverts to the old Mediterranean notion that the city (civitas) is one with ‘civilization’. For this Alberdi attacked him, reminding Sarmiento that in Argentina town and country, civilization and barbarism, were not disjoined but fused in a single society and polity.

The Role of the Apparel Industry in Puerto Rico's Economic Development

THE BOLE OF THE APPABEL INDUSTRY IN PUERTO RICO'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Robert J. Tata Puerto Rico's program of planned economic development has achieved outstanding success. The widely-acclaimed "Operation Bootstrap " has transformed the island from abject poverty to its present status as Latin America's wealthiest region. Governmental planning and economic stimulation have been key parts of the development process. Recognizing the island's limited potential for agriculture, mining, and service activities, government planners since 1948 have promoted manufacturing as the vehicle for economic progress. The Puerto Rican Industrial Development Company, Economic Development Administration (Fomento), and several other Commonwealth government agencies devised a variety of services to attract manufacturers to the island. These services have included tax exemptions, loans, buildings, labor training, management and engineering consultation , industrial and economic research, special incentives for particular industries and particular locations, assistance in obtaining utilities, and consultants for special problems. (1) These incentives eliminated many of the risks of initial investment and enhanced the possibilities for profitable operations. Specific goals of the industrialization program were: 1) maximize national income; 2) abolish poverty; 3) prevent excessive urbanization; 4) aid especially depressed towns; and 5) increase revenue for the Commonwealth treasury. (2) The apparel industry has been promoted as a manufacturing type wellsuited to Puerto Rican economic conditions and as one which can help to achieve national goals. The objectives of this study are to describe the structural and locational characteristics of Puerto Rico's apparel industry and to assess the role of the apparel industry in the island's economic progress by comparing the statistics from regression analyses for 1950-1960 and 1960-1970. THE APPAREL INDUSTRY. In 1973 the apparel industry (SIC category 23) employed more people, produced more income, and Dr. Tata is Associate Professor of Geography at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL 33431. 126 Southeastern Geographer APPAREL INDUSTRY, 1964 Puerto Rico ARECIBO CULEBRA PONCE HOUSiNDS OF PAYROLL S Figure 1. Locations of Puerto Rico's Apparel Industry: 1964. contributed more to the value of exports than any other industry in Puerto Rico. (3) Precursor to the modern apparel industry was the impoverished needlework industry. In 1940, the needlework industry was the island's third largest industry after sugar refining and tobacco. It was a cottage industry and workers were paid only a few cents per day. Apparel today is a thoroughly modern industry, and such wellknown firms as Jantzen, BVD, Maidenform, Van Raalte, Kayser-Roth, Bali, Equisite Form, Lovable and many others have large plants in Puerto Rico. Most plants produce women's, misses', children's, and infants ' undergarments. Women's and juniors' outerwear and men's and boys' suits, coats, work clothes, and furnishings are other important products. Apparel firms are located in most of Puerto Rico's 76 municipios. Comparison of the locations of the apparel industry in 1964 and 1973 indicated that it had remained concentrated in the San Juan metropolitan area and in Mayagiiez (Figs. 1 and 2). Whereas the industry was found in more municipios in 1973 than in 1964, the dominance of San Juan and Mayagiiez had also been strengthened. The San Juan concentration can be explained largely by the capital city's role as a dominant primate city in the island's economy. Because apparel is a "footloose" industry, however, it would seem that a more even spatial Vol. XVII, No. 2 127 APPAREL INDUSTRY, 1973 Puerto Rico ARFCIBU¦ PUNCF Figure 2. Locations of Puerto Rico's Apparel Industry: 1973. distribution of the industry should exist, especially in view of the government's goals to avoid excessive urbanization and to aid depressed towns. Mayagiiez was a center for the old needlework industry and perhaps this provided a base for the city's development as a leader in modern apparel production. Fomento has been moderately successful in providing most municipios with some apparel production. With some notable exceptions in the southern and central parts of the island, most municipios have made large gains in apparel payroll (Fig. 3). The apparel industry comprised some 650 plants in 1973, about 75 percent of which were promoted by Fomento. "Promoted" means that Fomento spent scarce resources to entice the firms to start operations on...

Some Arguments in Defense of the Venetians on the Fourth Crusade

OF THE MANY MYTHS clouding Venetian history none has been more influential and persistent than pejorative one concerning city's role in Fourth Crusade. The indictment of Venice was stated most eloquently by John Ruskin, who wrote that the expedition which was commanded by noblest of her princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in which while all Europe around her was wasted by fire of its devotion, she first calculated highest price she could exact from its piety for armament she furnished, and then, for advancement of her own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her religion.1 Since Louis de Mas Latrie in mid-nineteenth century first enunciated classic scholarly theory of Venetian treason in Fourth Crusade many historians have charged that Dandolo and Venetians schemed to exploit religious zeal of crusaders to gain their own commercial ends.2 Donald M. Nicol in new Cambridge Medieval History accurately sums up prevailing view with which he ardently agrees: In interminable controversy over diversion of Fourth Crusade, many have doubted ulterior motives of Philip of Swabia, of Boniface of Montferrat, and of Innocent III. But few have tried to exonerate Venetians.3 Even scholars who are otherwise well disposed toward Venice, such as distinguished Venetophile, Frederic C. Lane, often allow myth of Venetian duplicity to intrude into their writings,4 and Venice's staunchest defender, Roberto Cessi, obviously strains to offer plausible vindication of her role in great misadventure.'

Power and Mobilization in the Urban Community: Reconsidering the Ecological Approach

Hawley's theory that the distribution of system power in the urban community is related to its capacity for mobilization on public issues is examined in the framework of a model specifying mobilization, the scope of municipal government, the MPO ratio and organizational dimensions of system power (employment concentration and absentee-ownership) as consequences of the city's functional role in an urban division of labor. The model treats mobilization as an unobserved variable mediating the effects of community structure on three policy variables: municipal government expenditures, urban renewal and poverty program funding. Coefficients estimated under the model suggest that, while the MPO ratio is strongly dependent on urban function and organizational structure, its direct effect on mobilization is stronger than effects produced by these factors. The model postulating mobilization is then compared with the results of separate regressions calculated for each policy variable. The data indicate that it constitutes a reasonably good fit to regression estimates where municipal expenditures and urban renewal success are dependent variables but not in the case of poverty funds. With regard to the latter, the organizational measures of system power prove more important than the MPO ratio. Furthermore, governmental scope is found to be a moderately important variable intervening between elements of community structure and policy consequences, but its influence is considerably less than that of other variables in the model. In conclusion, general support is claimed for an ecological approach which views urban public policy as the end result of a sequence of conditions originating with city size and economic function.

City and River in Iran: Urbanization and Irrigation of the Iranian Plateau

If viewed in full historical perspective, Isfahan may reasonably claim to have been the most important city on the Iranian plateau. It is also the most studied. However, although its unique historical monuments may possibly have (compared with the historiography of other great cities) received scholarly attention commensurate with the city's historical role, relatively little attention has been paid to its social and ecological history. Why did Shāh ᶜAbbās choose Isfahan for his capital? What are the geographical factors that distinguish the city of Isfahan from the rest of the plateau? What were their implications for the social and political history of the city? More specifically, what was the role of the river, the Zayandah Rud, in the growth of the city? Is it profitable to seek a cause and effect relationship between the organization of irrigation for the agricultural base of the region's economy and the political and economic development of the city?

Urbanization and national development: Some approaches to the dilemma

The economic and physical characteristics of cities are closely related, yet both economists and physical planners evidence insufficient awareness of the city's important role in national development. A greater recognition is essential, for the economies of developing countries can be advanced by policies designed to direct the future course of urbanization and to exploit the contribution to development which the urban resource can make. Many developing nations evidence a heavy concentration of industry, commercial services, educational and health facilities, and other modernizing institutions and individuals at one or two major metropolitan centers. Such concentration is inevitable at an early stage of growth. In the history of developed nations, however, other centers eventually achieved the “external economies” of the metropolis and began to attract and generate new development of their own. This process of spread does not appear to be functioning as rapidly in many now-developing nations; and severe strains are occurring between metropolis and hinterland and within the metropolis itself. One important task for national government in such circumstances is to identify and encourage those productive and allied activities that are most suitable for location in the metropolis so that its economic base is strengthened. A second is to select a limited number of promising areas outside the center where major and conscious efforts will be made to create advantages comparable to those of the metropolis, building up “external economies” sufficient to generate sustained growth. These tasks require the skills of both economists and physical planners. Some progress can be made by adapting sector-oriented national plans to include urban policy, and by adapting local land use and design plans to reflect economic and social development goals. A few instances of experimentation with these approaches exist. Planning is but one step along the road, however, for a commitment to implement urban policy and programs on the part of the highest level of national government is critical.