City systems research: from morphology to relationality and positionality

ABSTRACT

Making reference to the ‘old’ concept of megalopolis I glance back to identify a future research agenda on city systems. Megalopolis happens to be not just a convenient scale around which to organize discussion but also a concept more seminal in its ‘putative relationality’ than often appreciated. The concept contains important seeds of subsequent and future research on city systems more generally or else prompts them to the extent that the scale of urbanization and functional urban relations may now exceed it. I suggest five themes within this agenda that speak to the underplayed and emergent (1) morphological, (2) informational, (3) incubatory, (4) relational properties of megalopolitan systems and how the latter property of city systems promises (5) a positionalist perspective that reaches beyond urban economic organization at the megalopolitan scale. I note in conclusion the possible additional benefits of this agenda in promoting a measure of intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue on a subject otherwise characterized by fragmentation.

KEYWORDS:

• City systems
• urban morphology
• incubator function
• hinge function
• positionality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors and referees for their positive comments and helpful suggestions on a previous draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 From a completely different tradition of scholarship but in language curiously similar to the political economy of Lefebvre, Whebell (1969, pp. 7–8) for example argues how ‘the real urban explosion, with the creation of urban-rural fringes and dormitory “exurbs”’ occurs along urban economic corridors.

2 Historically, physical transportation infrastructures have tended to confer the gateway function upon cities commanding an entrance into and exit out of a sizeable tributary or hinterland area where the entrance is likely to be constrained (Burghardt, 1971).

3 Scitovsky (1954) drew a distinction between pecuniary ad technological externalities, while more recently Storper (1995) has distinguished between traded and untraded interdependencies.

4 Planned attempts to build in innovation in the morphology of individual buildings or groups of buildings have been remarkably unsuccessful (Rankin, 2010).

5 Notably, those neighbourhoods subject to regimes dubbed non-plan fared better in terms of entrepreneurial performance than those that were considered totally planned in a sample of neighbourhoods in two Dutch cities (Folmer & Risselada, 2013).

6 Although Gottmann (1964, 1976) discussed megalopolis in largely descriptive morphological terms with a threshold population of 25 million, he also identified it as a complex functional urban system.

7 Big data was defined by Laney (2001 cited in French, Barchers & Zhang 2017) in terms of three Vs: volume, velocity and variety. It has since been further defined in terms of ‘a wide spectrum of observational or “naturally-occurring” data generated through transactional, operational, planning and social activities’ falling into sensor system, user-generated content, administrative, private sector, arts and humanities and hybrid data types (Thakuriah et al., 2017).

8 The term desakota is a combination of two Indonesian words desa (village) and kota (city) to refer to the mixed or rurban landscape of Southeast Asia (McGee, 1991). The term Zwischenstadt (or in between city) has been used by Sieverts (2003) to speak to some instances of urbanization in Europe.

9 McKeever (1970) was arguing that the suburbanization of corporate functions had also stimulated processes of new business formation by the 1970s. By the 1990s Bingham and Kimble (1995) were arguing that the economy of edge cities was often more diverse than supposed, countering to an extent the thought that edge cities do not generate agglomeration economies (Lang, 2003).

10 The term interplace is, after Phelps (2017), borrowed from Casey (1993) and generalized to speak to new inter-urban centres.

11 Perhaps the historical exception here is in the case of Japan where the concept of megalopolis was embraced for was while within national urban and regional planning policies (Hanes, 1993).The contemporary exception may be China where regional planning efforts for the Pearl River Delta Region, the Yangtze River Delta Region and Beijing-Tianjin axis appear likely to have some bearing on urban economic development prospects.