Urban Hierarchy Research Articles

Windows of global exchange: Dutch ports and the slave trade, 1600–1800

In 2008, Pierre Gervais contended that social and economic developments in the Atlantic were to be ascribed to an overwhelming European intervention in West Africa and the Americas. This article questions Gervais’s assumption by stressing how Europeans, West Africans and Americans – individuals and states – mutually influenced urban hierarchies and distributive hubs across three different continents, while arguing that these interactions and interconnections should be seen within a context of entangled histories. This contribution re-examines the Dutch experience of slave trade and shipping to assess the extent to which slave trading and shipping activities influenced port hierarchies in Europe, determined the organization of port hubs in West Africa and helped develop port structures in the Americas. This assessment is anchored in the data provided by the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the collections of the Dutch West India Company and the Middleburg Commercial Company, and the notarial archives of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back: Suzhi (Human Quality), Social Mobility, and E-Commerce Economy in China

ABSTRACTRural migrants in Chinese cities are often stigmatized as ‘low-suzhi’ population and marginalized in urban social hierarchy. Existing scholarship has demonstrated how urbanities used suzhi discourse to justify their exploitation of migrants while maintaining class distinctions, and how migrants embraced urban lifestyles to improve their suzhi. Yet, this literature rarely addresses resistance of the ‘inferior’. By looking at the social interactions between migrant entrepreneurs and local residents in a city of southeastern China, this study shows that the emerging e-commerce economy has enabled many rural migrants to acquire financial, social, and cultural capital, which empower them to speak for themselves. Their rising wealth and self-representation as ‘high-suzhi’ entrepreneurs has reshaped their identity in the urban business world.

Two metropolisation gradients in the European system of cities revealed by scaling laws

Urban systems share with other complex systems constraints on their dynamics that are revealed by pervasive structural features, among which scaling laws. Scaling laws are relationships between cities’ attributes and their size (here measured by their population). When the relationship is non proportional with exponents larger than 1, scaling laws indicate the relative concentration of some urban functions at the higher levels of urban hierarchies. Superlinear scaling thus reveals the metropolisation trends that are produced in the urban system, according to our evolutionary theory perspective, by the hierarchical diffusion of innovation waves. Considering the current urban changes linked with the globalisation processes as an ‘innovation’ that is likely to diffuse hierarchically in urban systems, we analyse the relationships between 25 indicators expressive of their position in globalisation processes and the size of European cities (356 largest functional urban areas of the 28 European Union member states plus Switzerland and Norway). When summarised in a single metropolisation factor, we expected to find a unique superlinear scaling relationship that would reveal the hierarchical structure of the unifying European system of cities. We instead identify two distinct metropolisation gradients for each of the Western and Eastern subsystem that we interpret according to the delayed globalisation process in the latter. This provides a demonstration of the usefulness of scaling laws for summarising stages in the process of hierarchical diffusion of innovation in systems of cities.

Hermanas desiguales. Las jerarquías urbanas a través de las hermandades bajomedievales

Este artículo es una propuesta de análisis de la jerarquización urbana a través de la perspectiva de las propias ciudades, atendiendo a sus políticas de asociación y a su sistema interno de reconocimiento de jerarquías. Con este objetivo se analiza el fenómeno de las hermandades castellanas desde su aparición en el siglo XIII hasta el reinado de Enrique IV atendiendo tanto a las redes urbanas que reflejan, como al creciente proceso de jerarquización interna sancionado por la progresiva regulación de estas instituciones. La conclusión es que las hermandades actúan a la vez como síntoma y causa de la jerarquización urbana en el territorio hispánico y, por ello, constituyen un ámbito privilegiado para el estudio de este fenómeno.

El ranking político y la jerarquía de las ciudades en el ducado de Brabante en la Baja Edad Media

Este artículo analiza la jerarquía y el ranking de las ciudades del ducado de Brabante en su principal institución política representativa, los llamados Estados de Brabante El objetivo de este artículo es intentar buscar una respuesta a la pregunta de por qué los cambios sociales y económicos en las ciudades no se manifiestan de forma total o parcial en el ámbito político. El análisis de una serie de listas de convocatoria de los Estados demuestra que había una diferenciación entre las ciudades y las llamadas “libertades”, y que además dentro de estas dos categorías se aplicaba una jerarquía territorial. Aunque las cuatro ‘capitales’ y otras tres ciudades importantes están en la cabeza de la jerarquía urbana, tanto en lo que se refiere a la participación como en el orden en el que están mencionadas, había espacio también para que otras ciudades más pequeñas participaran en el escenario político. El ranking de una ciudad llevaba consigo no sólo el disfrute de algunos derechos sino también el cumplimiento de algunas obligaciones, sobre todo de índole financiera, y que se expresaban simbólicamente, como por ejemplo en las donaciones de vino y en el orden de precedencia durante las reuniones de los Estados. Aunque la jerarquía política dentro de los Estados por lo general era bastante rígida, otros rankings como por ejemplo los militares y fiscales sí estaban sujetos a cambios.

La ciudad y el rey: renovación de la red urbana de Navarra al final de la Edad Media

Tras el análisis del desarrollo de la red urbana de Navarra hasta los inicios del siglo XIII, realizado en trabajos anteriores, se observaba una trama densa. Ésta se había formado al hilo de diversos condicionantes: el interés regio, el control del espacio y la consolidación de rutas preferentes de comunicación. Se intuía además que, a partir de ese momento y hasta el final de la Edad media, los elementos decisivos para la articulación de un sistema urbano jerarquizado serían otros. Analizar este proceso, entre 1219 y el inicio del siglo XVI, es el objetivo de este trabajo. Destaca ahora la consolidación de cuatro –máximo cinco– focos urbanos esenciales, con particular relevancia de tres –Pamplona, Tudela, Estella– definidos sobre todo por el peso político, administrativo, económico y eclesiástico de uno de ellos, y el administrativo y económico –sobre todo- de los otros dos. La trama urbana del final de la Edad Media se sostiene sobre estos puntos esenciales; la jerarquía urbana del reino y su sistema de articulación adquiere una forma más simple y acorde con los rasgos esenciales de las realidades urbanas y con las dimensiones del propio reino.

Is there a Tradeoff between Remote Living and Healthy Living? The Impact of Remoteness on Body Weight

Using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), we examine the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and the remoteness of the county in which the individual lives. Remoteness in this study is identified by calculating the geographical position of the county with respect to metropolitan areas of different sizes (urban hierarchy) of the location. Since BMI affects where an individual chooses to live, there may be endogeneity bias. To address this concern, we identify patterns of mobility in which the choice of location is independent of BMI. In a framework that accounts for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity and sources of endogeneity bias, we show that after controlling for urban sprawl or location density, there is no systematic manner through which remoteness affects body weight.

Urbanisation and land use transition in a second-tier city: The emergence of small factories in Gimpo, South Korea

This research incorporates tenets of growth regime theory through the case of Gimpo, a Seoul-dependent second-tier city. To put second-tier cities in a context that includes the concept of Korean and East Asian nuances, we suggest conceptualising the development of a growth regime theory through a dialogue that considers the departure from an agreement with the Western paradigm and path dependence of developmental states. The development of Gimpo has been heavily constrained by the central government’s control of the overwhelming growth of the Seoul Capital Area. Since the 1990s, however, the deregulation of the area has driven the creation of thousands of small factories. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group, archives, and site visits, the research demonstrates, first, that the central government and the city government have wavered between remaining interventionist and taking a neoliberal approach. The state allowed industrialisation of Seoul’s suburban cities, and the city government attempted to attract businesses into planned industrial parks but ended up allowing even more dispersed small factories. Second, the growth regime has emerged, including city government, real estate agencies, village leaders, landowners, entrepreneurs, and migrant-supporting organisations. They drove the development of the small factories by responding to policies and the influx of migrant workers. The village leaders, eejangs, who are both elected leaders and landowners, played a critical role by turning into developers and entrepreneurial mediators and persuading landowners to accommodate factories on their agricultural land. By examining the interaction between the urban growth regime and urban hierarchy, this research contributes to the debate on urban growth and development in various contexts.

Hierarchical Scaling in Systems of Natural Cities.

Hierarchies can be modeled by a set of exponential functions, from which we can derive a set of power laws indicative of scaling. The solution to a scaling relation equation is always a power law. The scaling laws are followed by many natural and social phenomena such as cities, earthquakes, and rivers. This paper reveals the power law behaviors in systems of natural cities by reconstructing the urban hierarchy with cascade structure. Cities of the U.S.A., Britain, France, and Germany are taken as examples to perform empirical analyses. The hierarchical scaling relations can be well fitted to the data points within the scaling ranges of the number, size and area of the natural cities. The size-number and area-number scaling exponents are close to 1, and the size-area allometric scaling exponent is slightly less than 1. The results show that natural cities follow hierarchical scaling laws very well. The principle of entropy maximization of urban evolution is then employed to explain the hierarchical scaling laws, and differences entropy maximizing processes are used to interpret the scaling exponents. This study is helpful for scientists to understand the power law behavior in the development of cities and systems of cities.

Sea-Land Interdependence in the Global Maritime Network: the Case of Australian Port Cities

This article tackles the longstanding issue of intermodality head on. From a geomatics perspective, we model both maritime and road networks connecting port and non-port cities taking into account crucial features such as physical geography, shortest paths, and transport costs. This creates the opportunity to study a hybrid network – both planar and non-planar, and the centrality/accessibility of cities in this bi-layered network. Based on the case of Australia, main results convey new empirical findings on how port and urban hierarchies correlate with single-layered and bi-layered connectivity. We discuss main results in the light of network science, spatial science, and transport studies.

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility, Urban Entrepreneurialism, and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan, China

AbstractThis research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.

Planning and Design Attributes of Preplanned Postmodern Capital Cities: A Comparative Study

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The effects of new international airports and air-freight integrator's hubs on the mobility of cities in urban hierarchies: A case study in East and Southeast Asia

This paper examines international air traffic flows from, to and within East and Southeast Asia, and in turn the hub status of cities over the years from 1982 to 2012. Its focus of attention is the effects of new international airports and integrator's hubs on the mobility of cities in a region's urban hierarchy. The results reveal that Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul are strengthening their positions as international air traffic hubs, all of which opened a new international airport. Meanwhile, three global air-freight integrators have constructed a global or regional hub in most of these cities. In contrast, Tokyo is downgraded from a top ranked global city during the period analyzed.

Global Urban Development in China: A Case Study of Shanghai in the Context of Globalization

In the context of robust economic transformation and urban restructuring of Chinese cities, Shanghai has been become the predominant strategic site and frontier in the East Asia region embedded in globalization circumstance. The purpose of this paper is aiming to examine the global urban development of Shanghai with reference to its global city connectivity incorporated into world city network. Basically, the application of interlocking city network model proposed by GaWC research group is able to detect the relative connectivity and rankings of Shanghai in the combination of global scale and national scale. Based upon the comprehensive modelling application, as well as qualitative analysis, we can corroborate that Shanghai has been deemed as leading world city in the Chinese urban hierarchy, this unprecedented urban development and city revival is attributed to global strategy of multinational advanced producer services firms in Shanghai, and global provision of foreign direct investment in this prosperous metropolis thereby transforming this preeminent world city into new trajectory in globalization.

Maritime networks as systems of cities: The long-term interdependencies between global shipping flows and urban development (1890–2010)

This article is the first-ever analysis of cities in relation to maritime transport flows from a relational, or network, perspective. Based on untapped vessel movement data covering the last 120years, this articles sheds new light about the interdependencies at stake between urban hierarchies and port hierarchies overtime. Main results point to the fading correlation between traffic volume, port centrality, and city size, while the largest cities have maintained their prominence in the global maritime network despite contemporary spatial and functional changes affecting the distribution of transport systems and commodity chains. Such findings help better understanding not only the spatial and functional evolution of port-city relationships and maritime transport; they also confirm the importance of taking into account the long-term dynamics and socio-economic embedding of spatial networks in geography and other disciplines.

Interurban house price gradient

This paper applies a general spatial equilibrium model to investigate the effect that distance within urban hierarchy can have on interurban house prices. Our spatial model predicts a negative price gradient towards higher-tier cities, which can be decomposed into a ’productivity component’ and an ’amenity component’, representing respectively the effect of wage differences and households’ valuation of access to higher-order services. The theoretical findings are tested on data for the hierarchical urban system of the Pan-Yangtze River Delta in China. Both central and subcentral cities are shown to impose statistically significant distance penalties on interurban house prices, even after we control for amenities and characteristics that are generally considered to be the determinants of house prices. According to the empirical decomposition, the negative house price gradients are largely accounted for by the productivity component.

Looking for an Identity. The Patria and the Greek Cities in Late Antique Roman Empire

From the second century AD onwards, many patria were written in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Although none of these works have survived, the mentions of them in the later tradition demonstrate the importance they had in the Greek provinces. The aim of this paper is to analyse the link between the political evolution of the late Empire and the production of patria. I argue that these literary products testify to the changes of the cities within the urban hierarchy of the eastern Empire. In particular, they show the development of the centres linked to the three capitals of the Roman east : Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople. Indeed, the presence of the imperial court (and the resulting flow of taxes and supplies) put these cities at the centre of extended urban networks. These urbanized areas connecting the three capitals and their hinterland have been defined by Peter Brown “ corridors of Empire”. The centres entering these large-scale corridors had to justify their new position in the imperial network, and the best way to achieve the goal was linking themselves to the mythical and historical circuits of the Greek world. The patria served this purpose. While modelling the collective memory of myths, histories, and traditions of these cities, they canonized the acquired status.

Urban networks among Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road": A case of web search activity in cyberspace.

“The Belt and Road” initiative has been expected to facilitate interactions among numerous city centers. This initiative would generate a number of centers, both economic and political, which would facilitate greater interaction. To explore how information flows are merged and the specific opportunities that may be offered, Chinese cities along “the Belt and Road” are selected for a case study. Furthermore, urban networks in cyberspace have been characterized by their infrastructure orientation, which implies that there is a relative dearth of studies focusing on the investigation of urban hierarchies by capturing information flows between Chinese cities along “the Belt and Road”. This paper employs Baidu, the main web search engine in China, to examine urban hierarchies. The results show that urban networks become more balanced, shifting from a polycentric to a homogenized pattern. Furthermore, cities in networks tend to have both a hierarchical system and a spatial concentration primarily in regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta region. Urban hierarchy based on web search activity does not follow the existing hierarchical system based on geospatial and economic development in all cases. Moreover, urban networks, under the framework of “the Belt and Road”, show several significant corridors and more opportunities for more cities, particularly western cities. Furthermore, factors that may influence web search activity are explored. The results show that web search activity is significantly influenced by the economic gap, geographical proximity and administrative rank of the city.

Unraveling latent dimensions of the urban mosaic: A multi-criteria spatial approach to metropolitan transformations

We investigated local-scale urban profiles by analysing the spatial structure of 124 territorial indicators to identify possibly relevant dimensions influencing urban evolution and promoting socioeconomic transformation. To assess patterns and processes of urban expansion, Athens (Greece) was taken as a prototype of metropolitan systems with a diversified morphology and entropic functions. Exploratory spatial data analysis identified six dimensions of urban evolution: population concentration, sprawl, social segregation, income growth, specialization in commerce/retail/logistics and industrial decline. Urban centres were profiled according to the dominant dimension(s). Cluster analysis identified the urban hierarchy in the Athens metropolitan region based on population density, highlighting more subtle gradients associated with settlement morphology, social diversification, local development and economic performance. The proposed methodology stems from the ‘factorial ecology' approach, providing a coherent overview of the recent transformations that impact dimensions of urban sustainability.

Overlapping labour market areas based on link communities

AbstractMany urban areas around the world have expanded from monocentric to polycentric regions forming larger hierarchical structures. These regions represent functional regions or labour market areas (LMAs) that are classified as groups of counties representing mutually exclusive, non‐overlapping geographies. In practice, however, a county may belong to multiple overlapping LMAs. To model this overlapping across urban hierarchies, we extend the link community method from network theory and apply it to US commuting data. Our proposed approach reliably identifies the LMAs that we would expect to find as well as core and periphery areas within them.