Abstract
Within a number of disciplines, the terms “city” and “region” are frequently referred to in combination, raising the obvious question as to the relationship between two. The central focus of the paper involves an attempt to identify the more significant differences between the city and the region in terms of their respective modes of spatial organization. This is undertaken from three broad perspectives. The first compares the individual city and the individual region as independent entities, while the second perspective considers the city in relation to the region in which it is located. A third perspective is concerned with a system of cities in comparison with a system of regions. The latter part of the discussion examines alternative definitions of the city, and the extent to which these may be regarded as satisfactory.
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Notes
For nations with populations of less than around 50 m (particularly if these are also territorially extensive) a minimum built-city population below the 200,000 level would be more realistic, while a value greater than 200,000 might be more appropriate for nations with populations in excess of 50 m. On particular occasions it has been found desirable to allow the minimum population of the built city to vary according to the overall population density within different geographical sections of a nation (Bogue 1950, p. 16).
In contrast to the nodal region, a region based on a river basin is frequently not organized around a particular city or node, while the polycentric urban region has no single city occupying a position of clear dominance.
In other respects, cities can be said to be in competition, since firms in different cities compete for markets, skilled labor, capital, entrepreneurial talent, etc. Within the individual city, competition for land among the various users is obviously present.
There were, of course, exceptions to this spacing of cities, and mention has already been made of the twin-city phenomenon. In other instances, the expansion of a group of neighboring independent cities (and smaller urban centers) eventually coalesced to form of a single urban concentration such as Boston in the USA and Birmingham in the UK.
As used in this subsection (and as commonly employed in the literature), the term “density function” refers exclusively to marginal density, i.e., the density at distance x from the center of the city or the region. By contrast, average density is the population density within the area extending from a central location to a perimeter at distance x. The relationship between the two types of function (marginal and average) is discussed by Holden and Parr (2013).
It might be supposed that the existence of an urban center in the hinterland at a particular distance from the core city of the region would cause a secondary peak in distance–density plot. This tends not to be the case, however. Each point on a distance–density plot (from which the best-fitting function is derived) refers to the mean density throughout the relevant concentric ring. This has the effect of smoothing the form of plot, usually leading to a suppression of a local peak. In the Bogue (1950) study, the vast majority of the regional distance–density plots did not display secondary peaks.
The argument here does not refer to those agglomeration economies (usually of urbanization type) which are enjoyed by firms in non-core cities of the region. These are appropriately termed “local agglomeration economies.”
If the focus is on all urban centers, which would include those well below the minimum level for the built city of 200,000 (\(p_{h}\) in Fig. 2a), net entry of centers into the system over a given interval would be negligible or nonexistent. As a consequence and assuming the law of proportionate effect to be in operation, the steady-state distribution would tend to the cumulative lognormal, as in the case of regions.
An upper limit below 100 % is necessary, in order to exclude the relatively few workers that are employed in the built city but who reside at particularly long distances from it. Without such a limit, the workforce city would become unrealistically large.
In a compact nation with a high population density, the various functional urban areas might form a space-filling set, as in the study of the Netherlands by Klaassen et al. (1981). Outcomes such as this may also be due to the selection of a relatively low minimum-population level for cities on which the functional urban areas are based.
The problem is exacerbated if the added units are of a relatively large areal extent, as tends to be the case for certain MSAs in the western states of the USA, where the “added” counties are especially large. This difficulty does not arise in the case of the various forms of the extended city considered in Sect. 7.1, where the areal extent of the added units is deliberately small.
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Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to D. Holden and anonymous referees for suggesting a number of modifications and revisions. Thanks are also due to D. Adams, D. Houston, R. Paddison, N. Sprigings, and K. Swales, who provided valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper.
