The growth in towns and cities across the world be it developed or developing, industrialist or pre-industrial, has fueled man’s appetite to be informed about the spatial aspects of cities-their location, growth and relationship both one with another and with their surrounding regions. However, the recurrent pattern of urban land use has to be formulated and for that a fair knowledge and understanding of laws and theories is required. Therefore, let us take a journey of laws and theories of urban space and get adequately familiar with them.
The Rank Size Rule
- The relationships between city rank and city population size was first noticed by F. Auerbach in 1913, that when the rank numbers (from largest to smallest towns) are plotted against their respective population, a regular relationship generally emerges.
- The “rank-size rule”, proposed by G. K. Zipf in 1949, states that if all urban settlements in an area are ranked in descending order of population, the population of the ‘nth’ town will be 1/nth that of the largest town.
- Zipf’s rank-size rule can mathematically be expressed as Pn = P1/n where Pn is the population of the town of rank n in the descending order and P1 is the population of the largest city. Thus, if the largest city has a population of 50 lakhs, the tenth ranking town should, as per the rule, have a population of 5 lakh people.
Concept Note
The ‘exploded city’ view was postulated in the book Social Geography of the United States by J. Wreford Watson. The theoretical position of the margin of an urban field can be calculated by using a technique known as breaking point theory.
A. E. Smailes divided a city region into Core Area, Outer Area and Fringe Area. The ‘law of Retail Trade Gravitation’ predicts the proportion of retail trade that two towns will derive from a settlement (k) lying between them. This is relevant to the question of the theoretical delimitation of urban fields.
Theories of Urban Structure
Concentric Zone Theory
This theory based on hypothetical pattern of urban growth was first postulated in 1923 by an urban sociologist, E.W. Burgess, while studying the urban morphology of the city of Chicago, the USA. Through this model, Burgess stated that the development of a city place from its central commercial core takes place in a series of concentric circles. He identified five zones in concentric pattern expanding outward from the city core. Let’s know what are these zones.
Zone No. 1: This is the C.B.D. (Central Business District), the heart of the City. It has shops, offices, banks, theaters and hotels. It has multi-story skyscrapers, transport lines, converge in this zone. The CBD draws its business from all other encircling zones.
Zone No. 2: Surrounding the CBD, lies a traditional area, a zone of residential deterioration, marked also by the encroachment of business and light manufacturing. This is a zone of urban plight of tenements and slums and inadequate services.
Zone No. 3: This is the Zone of working men’s houses.
Zone No. 4: This consists of middle class residence, a suburban area that is characterized by greater affluence and spaciousness.
Zone No. 5: This is the Urban Fringe consisting of communities that are in effete dormitories of the CBD, where most of the economically active residents go to work. Here lies some of the highest quality residential houses.
Concentric Zone Theory as Propounded by Prof. E.W. Burgess
Indian City of Muzaffarpur Somewhat Conforming to The Concentric Theory
The Sector Theory
This theory was proposed by Homer Hoyt and M. R. Davie in 1939. According to this theory, patterns of urban land use are conditioned by the arranged routes radiating from the city Center creating a sectoral pattern of land and rental value influencing the urban land use pattern.
Sectors: –
- The CBD
- Wholesaling and Light Manufacturing
- Low-Class Residential Area
- Medium Class Residential Area.
- High Class Residential Area.
Colby’s Dynamic Theory
According to this theory the patterns of any city at any given point is the result of forces at work, i.e., centripetal and centrifugal. Centripetal forces are of two types: (i) residents and business class people seeking the comforts of life in urban centers get lured into a city; (ii) within the city residents and business are drawn towards C.B.D from the fringe area, a C.B.D provides better access to both the consumers and the laborers. It is main hub of the city with stores, banks, libraries, theaters and clubs. Centrifugal forces just act in a reverse manner and drive people away from the C.B.D into suburbs. Even congested slums force people and business activities to move out of the city center.
The Multiple Nuclei Theory
In 1945, this theory was proposed by C. D. Harris and E. L. Ullman. It was suggested that land use pattern in most large cities develop around a number of discrete centers or nuclei rather than a single center as described in the concentric and sector models.
Von Thunen’s Model
Von Thunen conceived the idea of a land use model in both urban and rural landscape around a city on an isotropic landscape. His idea is basically how economic rent decreases from center of a city to its periphery. His system of land use around a city with no trade alliance with any other country is ring shaped. Near the city, he envisages rings of forest, crop rotation, horticulture and dairying. His theory stresses more on agricultural land use around a city rather than the land use within the city.
Sinclair’s Model
Sinclair propounded a ring type model in 1967. The progression of intensity of his ring’s is directly proportional to the degree of urban influence in form of high urban taxes, constrained zoning and disturbances in the vicinity of urban areas. This theory is also supported by two British writers, Best and Gosson. They believe there is a shift supported by cause i.e. increasing competition from distant areas with better production facilities, and loss of casual labour to city jobs by rural-urban fringe farmers.
Sinclair’s Pattern of Land use around an expanding metropolitan area are as follows: –
- Urban Farming close to the city
- Vacant and grazing land
- Field crop and grazing land
- Dairying and field crop land
- Specialised food grain-livestock
Concept Note
A pioneer study of the CBD was done by American geographers R. E. Murphy and J.E. Vance Jr. In 1951, based on a study of 36 cities, the economist C. Clark describe the pattern of population density in any city.Hypermarkets are carefully planned out-of-town shopping centers.
The Central Place Theory
The theory of central place is associated with the economically optimum location of services of different variety and range both for the town as service provider and the countryside as the service getter. The term ‘central place’ was first used by Mark Jefferson in 1931, while defining a settlement which is necessarily a focus of various economic and social activities for the surrounding hinterland.
Walter Christaller analyzed the ‘centrality’ in detail in 1931, in West Germany, on the basis of number of telephone connections at a place as the prime criterion for determining the hierarchy. Later A. Losch did some modification on it.
Christaller proposed that settlements with the lowest order specialization would be equally spaced and surrounded by hexagonal-shaped service areas or hinterlands. He assumed a stable price of the land, equal land surface and isotropic characteristics of the land.According to him, the smallest centers would lie approximately 7 km. apart. He also outlined hierarchy according to K value:K=3 represents Marketing Principle. It favors the development of symmetrical nested hierarchy of central places. This principle postulates that rural produce comes to the higher order centers through lower order centers and the goods produced in urban areas move through higher order centers to the lower order centers.K = 4 represents Traffic Principle.
In this principle, the number of centers followed the geometrical progression as 1,4,16,64, and so on. At this level one big center serves 4 lower order centers.K-7 represents Administrative Principle. At this level one bigger central place serves seven second order centers.In 1940, the economist A. Losch presented an important modification of Christaller’s Model. Like Christaller, he again used hexagonal service areas, but allowed various hexagonal systems to co-exist. He developed a more sophisticated form of economic landscape by superimposing all the various hexagonal systems.
Nested Hierarchy Theory
A. K. Philberk, an American geographer based his nested hierarchy theory on the following: –
- Inter-connection between different occupations viz. agriculture, cattle rearing, mining, manufacturing, industry and trade are found between uniform areas which are homogenous in terms of occupance.
- Origin of nodal areas — in one nodal area different uniform areas are found which are connected with the focal point. The example of a nodal region could be one town, which is made of different mohallas.
- Nested hierarchy of nodal organization — this is the third postulate of nested hierarchy theory, which is related with the occupant units arrangement. This hierarchy turns from uniform relationship to nodal organization.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.