Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and Japan were transformed from predominantly rural to primarily urban
cultures. Within the industrializing metropolis, as with cities since the
Neolithic, time and space were dramatically folded and refolded in twisting
networks of power, wealth, and knowledge. For example, the enormous
amounts of capital sunk into the built environments of industrial cities gen-
erated complex patterns of Ricardian rents based on the di
erential locations
of various properties, creating a relative scarcity of accessibility where none
existed before (Harvey 1985a).
Several forces re
ff
ecting the political economy of industrial capitalism
made large, dense, and diverse cities simultaneously possible and necessary.
The industrialization of urban space proved highly problematic for the new,
accelerated form of capitalism, for which the old spatial
fl
fi
fix of medieval
streets was insu
cient to meet the challenge of larger and more rapid vol-
umes of
flows of people and goods; the new, industrialized production sys-
tem necessitated a reworking of the urban spaces of circulation. The spatial
structure of cities has long been governed by transportation systems, which
shape the opportunities, speed, and e
fl
ciency of travel. Early modern cities
were limited in population size by their extent of their agricultural hinter-
lands: a team of horses, for example, would eat a su
ciently large portion
of the grain they hauled to make trips more than 20 miles unpro
table
(Pomeranz and Topik 1999). In the context of the newly formed nation-
states, however, capital cities, with a monopoly over government services,
could a
fi
ord to pay higher prices, and thus began to surge ahead of those
lower in their respective national urban hierarchies. Modern street systems
were standardized, paved, uni
ff
fi
ed into a coherent network, and publicly
managed to maximize the e
rms,
creating accessibility surfaces of historically unprecedented smoothness. In
the early nineteenth century, John Loudon McAdam introduced the new
method of road-building using cut stones and the cement named after
him, macadam (now asphalt), lowering the cost of road building and ensur-
ing the availability of smooth surfaces for transport. In most Western cities,
these roads assumed a rectilinear grid and came to symbolize the orderly
metropolis.
In the face of an increasingly extended and specialized spatial division of
labor and facing increasing predicaments as to how shuttle workers to and
from their jobs, many large cities in Europe and North America during the
1840s and 1850s adopted networks of horse-drawn omnibuses, including
both wagons and railroad cars, which enabled a widening separation between
work and home. Horse-drawn vehicles were instrumental in allowing the
burgeoning middle class to commute from the early suburbs of the late
nineteenth century; walking to work, once the norm, became a rarity. As
Walker (1981) notes, the fundamental spatial schism of the capitalist city,
between home and work (i.e., spaces of production and reproduction,
respectively), re
ciency of tra
c for households and
fi
ects not simply the impacts of transportation systems but
the division of labor as it di
fl
erentially enfolded local communities and
neighborhoods within a wider penumbra of class relations. The
ff
fi
first omnibus
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