Cities – Regions – Hinterlands

Metabolisms, Markets, and Mobilities Revisited

Martin Knoll, Martin Knoll

• Editorial: StudienVerlag
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783706561631
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia social

For centuries, cities have entertained close relationships of various kinds and qualities with their – adjoining or non-contiguous – hinterlands, the latter being structured around zones of agricultural production, transport corridors such as river systems, shipping routes or railway lines, market relations, but also issues of political domination, or landownership. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the blurring and re-negotiation of city-hinterland-relations under the auspices of fossil-fueled, industrialized and globalized economies and transitions in the energy base of societies became a dominant factor. A variety of new social forms of mobility, such as intra- and interregional migration, daily commuting and tourism, strengthened and at the same time complicated the interwovenness. Taking stock of regional case studies in Austria, Denmark, and Italy, this theme issue reflects on the historically changing relations between cities and rural areas, and on the factors which let cities and their hinterlands appear as a 'region' with a distinct social ecology and with a distinct economic, social and cultural profile. Particular emphasis is to be given to the 'making' and 'unmaking' of regions, the development of market relations over time, the changing framework conditions in terms of political constitution as well as changes in land use and the urbanizing effects of tourism in peripheral regions. Seit Jahrhunderten unterhalten Städte enge und komplexe Beziehungen mit ihrem jeweiligen Hinterland. Strukturiert wurden diese Hinterländer durch Zonen der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion, Verkehrskorridore, Marktbeziehungen, aber auch durch politische Dominanz oder Grundeigentum. Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert wurden die Stadt-Hinterland-Beziehungen unter den Vorzeichen fossilenergetischer, industrialisierter und globalisierter Ökonomien und Gesellschaften neu verhandelt. Mobilitätsformen wie Migration und Tourismus intensivierten und komplizierten das Beziehungsgefüge. Basierend auf Fallstudien zu Österreich, Dänemark und Italien untersucht das Jahrbuch die sich historisch wandelnden Beziehungen zwischen Städten und ländlichen Gebieten sowie die Produktion sozio-ökonomischer, sozial-ökologischer und kultureller Regionalität.

Jørgen Mikkelsen

The Surrounding Areas of Danish Cities and Towns on the Brink of Modernity

Abstract: This article describes the urban system and the urban-rural and inter-urban relations between towns in four Danish regions, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and with a focus on Copenhagen and the provincial centres Odense, Aalborg, and Aarhus. For centuries, the capital drew heavily on resources from many parts of the country, with the region extending roughly 30 kilometres outside of Copenhagen representing the most important catchment area during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers have divided this area into several supply zones that provided different products to the capital. Like Copenhagen, Odense and Aalborg have been undisputed centres of their respective parts of the country since the Middle Ages. The regions surrounding both these cities have rather distinct and stable boundaries. For example, the northernmost part of Jutland, which includes the long river-like Limfjord, has always belonged to the hinterland of Aalborg even though several small market towns are likewise situated along the bay. By contrast, eastern Jutland possessed no provincial centre before Aarhus assumed the role in the nineteenth century. Until that time, many of the towns in this region had relatively well-defined catchment areas, and competition for rural customers was apparently less pronounced than in many other parts of Denmark.

Keywords: hinterland, urban-rural relations, trade, infrastructure, urban hierarchy

The country behind the town – a multi-faceted phenomenon

In an article about London and its hinterland between 1600 and 1800, Michael Reed wrote that “all towns are multi-functional, and each function has its own hinterland”.¹ With this statement, he captured the many-faceted character of towns and cities as places for the exchange of goods as well as being economic, administrative, and cultural nodes in regions of varying sizes. At the same time, Reed stressed that the extent of a town’s sphere of influence strongly depends on what aspect is being examined.

For instance, there is usually a significant difference in size between the area from which servants immigrated into a European town during the eighteenth century and the area from which merchants and artisans settling in the same town during the same period originated. Normally, the catchment area for the latter was much larger, whereas the zone from which a town recruited its servants was often nearly identical to the closest surrounding area, whose inhabitants walked to the town each week to make their basic purchases. This only applies to smaller towns, however. Capitals, cities, and other towns with considerable attractiveness for immigration have always been able to allure all kinds of people from huge areas.²

Hektor Ammann, a Swiss expert on the history of European fairs, differentiated between three zones of the area surrounding a town in pre-industrial Europe, namely Umland, Hinterland, and Einflussbereich.³ The term Umland describes the area up to 30 kilometres from the town, meaning the district from which people would go to any weekly market day that might be held within or outside the town. The Hinterland, which extended to a distance of 50 to 60 kilometres outside the town, was the area that normally provided the town with immigrant merchants and artisans – and with buyers and sellers when the large town fairs were held a few times each year. Finally, the Einflussbereich was the region (or regions) affected by a town’s long-distance trading.

However, the size and character of a town’s catchment area in pre-industrial Europe was also heavily influenced by the so-called institutional factors, that is the political, administrative, and juridical framework of the economy: The siting of state works and institutions – from castles and fortresses to episcopal residences, courts, and tax offices – often greatly increased the economic activity of a town. For example, the fact that people from all over a specific region had to travel to a given town to attend court proceedings or public meetings enabled traders and innkeepers there to earn money by rendering services to the arriving travellers.

It was also quite common for the state to intervene in a town’s economic life by granting specific privileges like the right to hold a fair on certain days each year. Many towns were also assigned a “protection strip”, which meant that their traders and artisans enjoyed a quasimonopoly concerning the supply of people in the immediate surrounding area.⁴ Staple rights were a further way of concentrating trading activities in specific places. The decision to grant such privileges was often motivated by military considerations: The Danish government, for example, decided in 1661–1667 to concentrate nearly all foreign trade conducted within the kingdom in five towns.⁵ These towns were situated in different parts of the country, and all of them were fortified. They were ordered to permanently maintain a considerable stock of goods to benefit the local population and support the army in case of a new war (Denmark had been at war with Sweden four times between 1610 and 1660). Most of the towns in question were relatively small and economically weak, however, and were therefore unable to enforce the provisions of the staple legislation; as a result, all market towns were eventually permitted to conduct trade with foreign countries in 1689.⁶

Danish urban-rural relations – literature and sources

In this article, I will describe and compare the urban-rural and inter-urban relations in four Danish regions, namely the country’s two largest islands Zealand and Funen as well as the northern and the eastern part of the peninsula of Jutland. Using Ammann’s concepts along with the classic models of Walter Christaller and Johann Heinrich von Thünen, I will focus on the largest and most important city or town in each region and discuss the dynamics of urban hierarchies and conflicts between it and its surroundings and neighbouring towns. The study will primarily deal with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but other periods are included as well whenever necessary or suitable for providing an opportunity for a long historical perspective.

The information provided in this contribution is based on the study of a great many books, articles, and unpublished research about Danish urban history. The precise topic chosen is only rarely treated in detail in the available Danish literature, however. It is therefore necessary to compile data from a scattered and fragmentary field of research, and the sources used can be roughly organised into four groups:

1. Articles whose main subject is Danish urbanisation or the urban system and which therefore compare different (types of) urban areas.

2. “Biographies” of a specific city or town. Like many other countries, Denmark boasts a large number of works – some consisting of multiple thick volumes – intending to offer readers (first and foremost the inhabitants of the urban area in question) a broad overview of the history of a specific place or region “from the beginning” all the way to modern times. Some of these works contain a host of useful information about urban structures and processes that deserves to be considered in research at the national or even international level.

3. PhD theses, doctoral dissertations, and other research work about specific subjects of relevance for the article, especially trade networks and infrastructure.

4. Printed sources from the nineteenth century describing economic conditions in various regions.⁷

The literature mentioned in numbers 1 to 3 encompasses a broad spectrum of printed and unprinted sources ranging from private letters to official reports.⁸ One specific type of archival material used in several works are the probate cases of merchants and other tradesmen, as these files often include a wealth of correspondence and accounts useful for analyses of trade relations. Of particular interest are the debtor lists found in many merchant probate records. They are excerpts of account books and contain the names and addresses of customers who had not repaid their debts to the respective merchant at the time of the administration of the estate. Even if these lists undoubtedly only mention a small share of the total number of customers who purchased from a merchant, they do provide a clear impression of the respective catchment area – especially when comparing debtor lists from different merchants in the same town. Comparisons of such lists from neighbouring towns are likewise useful for studying the urban-rural relations in a region.⁹

Because of the heterogeneous character of the existing literature, it is difficult to draw strict comparisons between the four regions described in this article. I will therefore use a more “essayistic” style in presenting the regions, and the four sections will not all have the same scientific focus. It is my aim, however, to provide as precise and adequate as possible a characteristic of the urban-rural and inter-urban relations within each of the regions with special regard for the main cities and towns.

The Danish urban system and trade patterns before industrialisation

Like in many other parts of Europe, a large number of towns were established in Denmark between the eleventh century and the Black Death around 1350, with roughly 60 of them being granted market town privileges.¹⁰ By contrast, only few towns received these privileges between 1350 and 1900, and while most of the medieval towns were likely founded because of trade imperatives, institutional factors were the most important driving force behind the development of new towns in the early modern period (c. 1500–1800). Some were thus established as fortress towns, while other towns came into being as service centres for a castle or an academy for young noblemen. Apart from these institutional requirements, the urban expansion during the Middle Ages seems to have sufficed to meet Danish needs for a very long time; during economic crises in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Danish government officials even considered a potential reduction of the number of privileged towns on several occasions. It was only in 1809, however, that one of the smallest towns, Slangerup, was in fact deprived of i...

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