The study of cities:

historical and structural approaches

Pieter Saey
 The study of cities:
historical and structural approaches

• 1. Historical and structural approaches:

structural approaches relate to the logic of a system
historical approaches relate to causal chains

• 2. The real methodological problem of historiography

the use of knowledge of outcomes in the analysis of the past
 how to avoid historical necessity
2 strategies:
investigating periods in which the outcome is still undetermined
combining historical and structural approaches
 The study of cities:
historical and structural approaches

A critical analysis of the replacement of Christallerian ideas about central

places by Taylorian ideas about global cities.

Taylor has developed his ideas on the basis of a rejection of state-centric and
afterwards territorial thinking.
The background of my analysis is
(i) the rejection of the so-called morphogenetic approach in the pre-
positivist urban geography of the first half of the twentieth century
(ii) the narrowing down of the field of application of central place theory.
 The study of cities:
historical and structural approaches
• 3. Bobek-Christaller-Barton:
rejection of the historial approach of explaining the location of urban
settlements by site and situation
Bobek (1927): urban settlements are nodes in a network of flows
Christaller (1933): (spatial) structure
Barton (1978): agency (entrepreneurs)
2 kinds of centrality
Christallerian analysis as structural approach
• 4. From B.C.B. to P.J.T.
Hall (2002): Christaller for a global age
↔ Christaller’s theory, Taylor’s conception of the world city network
 The study of cities:
historical and structural approaches
• 5. Pirenne-Jacobs-Taylor
the legitimacy of the concept ‘cities as transhistorical entities’
Pirenne, Jacobs: city-based view of history with inter-city relations as
the formative force
Pirenne: historical approach
Jacobs, Taylor: structural approach
Jacobs: transubstantiation
Taylor: abstraction

• 6. The structural approach structures the historical approach

Determination of the unit of analysis
Example of the archipelago of cities 1250-1350 (Abu Lughod)
 1. Historical and structural approaches

• a structural approach relates to the logic of systems,

• a historical approach relates to:

(i) the examination of idiographic causal chains: chains of causes and
human purposes and motives, and their intended or unintended results
and the possible generalisations or general historical trends that can be
deduced from the investigation of these chains,
(ii) the actual formation, development and disintegration of systems,
e.g.
the analysis of the world system 1250-1350 by Janet Abu-Lughod
 2. The real methodological problem of
historiography

The use of knowledge of outcomes in the analysis of past events

E.g. the economic and political hegemony of the West in modern times

examining ex post factor of this outcome and then reasoning backward, to

rationalize why this supremacy had to be

conveys the impression that the rise of the West was an inherent
historical necessity
 2. The real methodological problem of
historiography

Strategies to avoid the pitfall of historical necessity

1. Abu-Lughod:
Investigation of a period in which the outcome is still undetermined

2. Combination of historical approach and structural approach

- Difference between existential necessity and necessary existence
- Reasoning backward is a legitimate procedure (retroduction or
abduction)
- Difference between structural causality and efficient causality
 2. The real methodological problem of
historiography

Strategies to avoid the pitfall of historical necessity

2. Combination of structural and historical approaches

In Aristotelian terms:
the structural approach should reveal formal causes,
the historical approach should reveal efficient and final causes.
In present-day language:
structure is causally effective, it constrains and enables,
agency is causally efficient,
human agency is intentionally causally efficient.
 The study of cities:
historical and structural approaches

A critical analysis of the replacement of Christallerian ideas about central

places by Taylorian ideas about global cities

to reveal the implications of the second strategy

 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton

Bobek (1927)
Grundfragen der Stadtgeographie (Basic questions of urban geography)

“Um städtische Siedlungen hervorzurufen, ist die Zusammenraffung, die

Konzentration, die Brechung dieser Verkehrsfäden an gewissen Punkten
nötig”
“The gathering, the concentration, the breaking of these threads of traffic in
certain points is necessary to bring about urban settlements.”
In present-day language:
“Urban settlements come into being as nodes in networks of flows of traffic.”
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
Bobek (1927)

Bobek reacted against the morphogenetic approach in urban geography:

• the description of the site or topographic location of the urban settlement,
• the description of the situation or geographic location of the urban settlement,
• the historical development of the urban settlement insofar as it is connected to
the site and situation
• the urban settlement as part of the broader landscape and as a landscape in itself.

Bobek argued that this approach only dealt with superficial characteristics of urban
settlements. If geography wanted to say more interesting things about urban
settlements, it should focus on their function “als lebendigen Wirtschafskörpers
innerhalb des Wirtschaftsgetriebes der Landschaft” [“as living economic bodies
within the economic machinery of the landscape”]. Further in the article Bobek
extended the notion of traffic to political and cultural communication.
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
Bobek (1927)

“In dieser Ansichziehung aller früher ungeordeneten Verkehrsfäden, welche

sich so wie durch die Wirkung eines Magnetpols zu einem radialen Netze
um die städtische Siedlung anordnen, scheint uns das geographisches
Faßbare und Wesentliche an städtischer Wirtschaft zu liegen. Den Namen
Stadt können nur solche Orte verdienen, welche eine derartige
beherrschende Stellung im wirtschaftlichen, kulturellen und politischen
Verkehr eines Gebietes besitzen.”

“It appears to us that the geographically explicable and essential aspects of

the urban economy are to be found in this attraction of all formerly
unordered threads of traffic that are organized into a radial network
around the urban settlement as if the latter function like a magnetic pole.
Only those places that hold such a controlling position in economic,
cultural and political communications deserve the name of Stadt (town,
city).”
 3. Bobek – Christaller – Barton
Christaller (1933)

rational behavior irrational behavior

public interest priv.i.

   
          resistances
schemes deviations
tertiary deviations of regional or local
primary chief law secundary laws nature,
of distribution of deviation explainable by economics;
(marketing (traffic
principle) principle, deviations not explainable by economics
separation
  princ.)  
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
Bobek (1927): network of flows
Christaller (1933): spatial structure

• Christallers theory meets the requirements of a scientific explanation.

• Science explains a fact when it is able to establish that the fact

was possible at time T1 and place P1, but
impossible at time T2 and place P1, and at time T1 and place P2.
This definition of scientific explanation conveys the idea that a fact could
not have happened in another way than it actually did, without being
inevitable.

• The method of abstraction is at the origin of the methodological success

of Christaller.
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
Bobek (1927): network of flows
Christaller (1933): spatial structure
Barton (1978): agency
The creation of centrality, AAAG

Barton rejects the neoclassical framework in which the received theory of

central places is formulated and defends an entrepreneurial/exchange
framework based on classical economics.

Centrality arises from the activities of the entrepreneur, which can be a

merchant, a trader, a retailer, a wholesaler, a banker.
3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton

Two kinds of centrality

• centrality generated by central functions that serve households (including

consumer services, education, administration, and so on) (Christaller)
= process of town formation (Taylor)

• centrality generated by producer services (Barton)

= process of city formation (Taylor)
 3. Bobek – Christaller - Barton
Christaller’s theory as structural approach

• Distinction between spatial system and system of agents = figuration

• Logic of a system: the functioning of the system according to the rules of
figuration when the agents act completely according to these rules
• Rules of figuration resulting in the spatial arrangement of central places:
- suppliers locate either as closely as possible to each other or as far
away as possible from each other
- consumers patronize the nearest central place
• Rules of figuration to maintain the system of suppliers and consumers
(the entire body of rules without which the society concerned would
disintegrate)
 4. From B.C.B to P.J.T.

Hall (2002): Christaller for a global age

• Drops the three lowest levels because the settlements concerned have
ceased to perform any significant role as central places
• Adds two new levels above the L-centres: the global cities and the sub-
global cities, which he identifies with the alpha global cities and beta or
gamma global cities from the GaWC-classification of global cities.

↔ Christaller’s theory
↔ Taylor’s conception of the world city network
 4. From B.C.B to P.J.T.

Christaller Hall

M-Ort Marktflecken no significance  

A-Ort Amtsstädchen no significance  

K-Ort Kreisstädchen limited significance

B-Ort Bezirkhauptort = Bezirkstadt

G-Ort Gaubezirkhauptort =?
P-Ort Provinzialhauptort = provincial city

L-Ort Landeszentrale = regional city

RT-Ort Reichsteilstadt subglobal city  

R-Ort Reichhauptstadt global city  

 4. From B.C.B to P.J.T.

Connectivity of cities replaces hierarchy of towns

• Christaller: towns servicing households in a hinterland

• Taylor: cities as locations of producer services servicing a hinterworld
Nevertheless: central places

Questions about the relation between central places and economic
development (growth pole mechanisms and state intervention)
To what degree does the key position of producer services entail a
coordinating or even organizing role of these services in capital
accumulation (global cities and commodity chains)?

Question about the legitimacy of the notion of cities as transhistorical entities
 5. Pirenne-Jacobs-Taylor

Transubstantiation

Procedures to neutralize the importance of social classes:

• Abstraction: Man appears in the shape of Economic Man
• Banalization: no particular role of social classes
• Transubstatiation: Man appears in the shape of (Wagnerian)
Ecological Man

Conception of cities as transhistorical entities

= variant of transubstantiation (Man appears in the shape of Jacobsian
Innovative City Man) ?
 5. Pirenne-Jacobs-Taylor

Pirenne: Medieval Cities

“History is obliged to recognize that, however briljant it seems in other

respects, the cycle of Charlemagne, considered from an economic
viewpoint, is a cycle of regression. […] The ninth century is the golden age
of what we have called the closed domestic economy and which we might
call, with more exactidude, the economic of no markets … [T]e period
which opened with the Carolingian era knew cities neither in the social
sense, nor in the economic sense, nor in the legal sense of the word.”
“[T]he ‘abbey-merchants’ were […] not free agents, but employees exclusively
in the service of their masters. It is not apparent that any of them ever
carried on business on his own account.”

European history:
Development of commerce by a strong independent middle class
Creation of cities with a strong middle class
 5. Pirenne-Jacobs-Taylor

Jacobs: The economy of cities, The nature of economics

World history: Development of networks of cities, economic parentage

The development of forces of production is:

not alternately promoted and hindered by the relations of production (Marx)
not caused by the development of Man’s creative capacities through his
exploitation of the physical environment (Ratzel, Ecological Man)
not caused by applying best practices of allocation (Economic Man)
but caused by the victory of the innovators in a permanent economic conflict
between innovators and conservatives (Innovative City Man)
= transubstantitiation
 5. Pirenne-Jacobs-Taylor

Taylor: Cities within spaces of flows, Cities and states

Abstraction 1: Creating a fiction (Economic Man)

Abstraction 2: Focusing on a selected number of qualities of the study object,

defined at a certain spatiotemporal level

 Transhistorical entities

Pirenne: historical approach, same causes same effects

Taylor: structural approach, moral syndromes = rules of figuration
 6. The structural approach structures the
historical approach
Determination of the unit of analysis

World city network as interlocking network:

• Level of the network: world-economy
• Nodal level: cities (local networks of institutions)
• Sub-nodal level: producer service firms
Agency:
• Firms, cities, sectors, nation-states
• Interaction: causal nexuses, identity assignments
 6. The structural approach structures the
historical approach
Determination of the unit of analysis

World city network:

• System of agents: a complex of internally related elements defined at the
appropriate level of spatiotemporal abstraction, Wallersteins modern
world-system in the ongoing phase of intensified globalization
• Logic: the functioning of the network according to the rules of the causal
nexuses and identity assignments when the four agents act completely
according to these rules
 Structural approach determines the causal chains to be investigated by the
historical approach
 6. The structural approach structures the
historical approach
Determination of the unit of analysis

Abu-Lughod: World system in formation 1250-1350 (archipelago of cities):

Transformation into an integrated world system has not been realized
because the subsystems followed their own path of development to such
a degree that the trade network was not able to integrate them and
fragmented
In structural terms:
The creation of a world-system failed because the systems to be integrated
followed their own logic to such a degree that the trade network was not
able to develop a logic of its own
 No system, no subsystems, no unit of analysis, no investigation of
commodity chains
 6. The structural approach structures the
historical approach
Determination of the unit of analysis

Misleading use of terms:

“The term ‘world system’, as it is currently used, has unfortunately been
conflated with the particular hierarchical structure of organization that
developed from the sixteenth century onward. This makes debates over
world systems less than fruitful. It is important to remember that a system
is simply ‘a whole composed of parts in orderly arrangement according to
some scheme (Oxford Dictionary).”

Issue is not similarity to the modern world-system, but

existence of complexes of internal relations between agents exhibiting a
logic of their own