Abstract
It was not long ago that economic activities exhibited clear, observable, and intelligible spatial configurations; they were geographically distributed in ways that made social sense. The spheres of production and consumption, and also worlds of work, exhibited spatial clarity, as did accompanying means of exchange and communication. Even though urban growth was ruthlessly driven by commercial interests, the nineteenth-century American city was highly legible with clear linkages between workers and their places of work and between merchants and their customers.
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Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929.
Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany. Trans. Carlisle W. Baskin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, [1933] 1966; Edward Ullman, “A Theory of Location of Cities,” American journal of Sociology 46 (1941): 853–864; Brian J. L. Berry and William L. Garrison, “A Note on Central Place Theory and the Range of a Good,” Economic Geography 34 (1958): 304–311.
See Edgar M. Hoover, The Location of Economic Activity. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963, pp. 284–286.
Specifically, the percentage living in towns of 2500 or more in 1850 was only about 15%. By 1910, 25% of the population was urban, whereas by 1990 over 80% was urban. Janet L. Abu-Lughod (Changing Cities. New York: HarperCollins, 1991) provides a clear summary of historical demographic trends in the United States.
Adapted from examples in John E. Brush, “The Hierarchy of Central Places in Southwestern Wisconsin,” Geographical Review 43 (1953): 380–402, and Arthur E. Smailes, “The Urban Hierarchy in England and Wales,” Geography 29 (1944): 41–51.
Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers. New York: The Free Press, 1962; Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
Ira Katznelson, City Trenches. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
In the long run, this process was altered. Federal urban policy subsidized suburban development, and the “trickle-down principle” whereby inner-city housing declined in rental value was altered by the speculative value of deteriorated housing stock. See Sam Marullo, “Racial Differences in Housing Consumption and Filtering,” pp. 229–254 in John S. Pipkin, Mark La Gory, and Judith R. Blau (eds.), Remaking the City. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983.
Louis Wirth, The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937.
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921.
Gunther Barth, City People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1989.
Hope T. Eldridge and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Population Distribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870–1950. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1964.
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967, p. xiv.
Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700-1900. New York: New York University Hall, 1984, p. 3.
Arthur Vidich, Small Town in Mass Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958; David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris De Bres. London: New Left Books, 1975, pp. 310–342; see also Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Ibid., pp. 378–379.
Gerald D. Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr. (eds.), A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. A Report of the Committee on the Status of Black Americans. National Research Council. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989, pp. 113–161.
See M. B. Brewer and R. M. Kramer, “The Psychology of Intergroup Attitudes,” Annual Review of Psychology 36 (1985): 219–243.
See William Darity, Jr., “What’s Left of the Economic Theory of Discrimination?” pp. 335–373 in Steven Schulman and William Darity, Jr. (eds.), The Question of Discrimination. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
There are limits to the mobility of labor. However, increasingly technology allows people to work at home; in some industries, middle and top management personnel are rotated through different establishments. In some countries, notably Japan, door-to-door sales replaces retail operations; direct selling accounts for 75% of the new car purchases. (See Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Charismatic Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 173.)
Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 162.
See Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 129–152; also George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
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(1993). Economy, Place, and Culture. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_6
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