3 Key excerpts on "Galactic City Model"

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  The Robust City

  • Tony Hall(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  track based + walk. The second is that there would no longer be green areas within walking distance for all residents.

  Frey went on to debate whole city models. Drawing heavily on Lynch, he compared the ‘core city’, ‘galaxy’, two variants on the ‘star’, ‘linear city’, ‘regional city’ (where towns and cities were arranged on a polycentric net) and ‘satellite city’, a system of smaller cities arranged in a circle around a larger one, very similar to Ebenezer Howard’s proposal. To get to a quantitative basis for a comparison between them, he made assumptions about population density and considered two alternative city sizes. The sense of the discussion was concerned with an optimum size of city rather than a system that would facilitate indefinite expansion. There is merit in quoting Frey’s conclusions in full:

  Overall, and under the assumption that all models accommodate a similar population and that all criteria are given equal weight, the core city scores worst, the linear city and the galaxy of settlements second worst, the star city is somewhere in the middle, and the satellite city and regional city score best. However, if the degree of containment, access to services and facilities, access to the countryside, environmental conditions and the potential for social mix, local autonomy and adaptability are given higher priorities, the core city clearly scores negatively in all aspects other than containment, the galaxy of settlements and the linear city are somewhere in the middle, the star city and satellite city score well and the regional city again scores best. If containment is given a high priority, then the compact city scores best, and the galaxy of settlements and linear city worst, as can be expected. With regard to the city-country relationship, the core city is problematic when larger than the central core of the star or satellite city, whereas all other city models score well.

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  The Economics of Property and Planning

  Future Value

  • Graham Squires(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Figure 23 ). The theory has an emphasis transport in terms of growth and that people have greater movement due to increased car ownership in particular. This increase of movement allows for the specialisation of regional centres that for instance focus on heavy industry or business parks. It can be argued that the multiple nuclei model is more realistic than the concentric-zone and radial-sector models, although many of the characteristics of the latter two models are included in the multiple-nuclei hypothesis.

  Figure 22

  The Radial Sector Model of Land Use

  Source: Author, Adapted from Hoyt (1939)

  Figure 23

  Multiple Nuclei Model

  Source: Author, Adapted from Harris and Ullman (1945)

  Critique of this type of modelling is in its generalisation in that it cannot be directly applied to any one place. In addition, cities with natural barriers such as the being on the coast will therefore not have a complete ring growth pattern. Further difficulty of the model is that heavy industry is not sophisticatedly considered in the model. For all the three models, planning constraints such as zoning are not clearly accounted for. The models do hold though as a good way to start thinking of how large cities in particular have developed and thus build on when developing more intricate iterations when modelling urban patterns.

  Green belts, urban sprawl, and growth control

  Final key conceptual patterns and dynamics when introducing the development of the place is the notion of urban sprawl that radiates away from a CBD core. This sprawl can be somewhat extreme if drivers such as population (not always a key reason) and rising income continue to rise (enabling desires to drift further into the suburbs), plus if regulation and directives in policy such as via the planning system enable to curb and shape such horizontal urban expansion. Low natural barriers such as mountains and great lakes, in addition to planning that promotes low-density property development, have enabled such sprawl. Density is one key measure that can demonstrate such sprawl and is calculated as the percentage of a metro area’s population that lives in urbanised areas. Further, urbanised areas can also be defined statistically by residents per square mile or kilometre, such as those parts of a metro with 1,000 or more residents per square kilometre.

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  Key Concepts in Urban Studies

  • Mark Gottdiener, Leslie Budd, Panu Lehtovuori(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Harris and Ullman, like Hoyt, were essentially correct in conceiving of the development of urban space as consisting of irregular sectors and centers rather than concentric zones under pressure of real estate competition among users with different needs. However, both of these alternative models assumed that the CBD, or the central core of any city, would remain dominant. They did not foresee the way the entire metro region would experience functional specialization.

  Harris and Ullman (1945) argued that the spin offs of activities from the CBD would take the shape of separate centers rather than sectors radiating from the central core. These smaller centers were conceived as ‘homogeneous urban districts’ and they remained organized around a CBD of some kind. In their model, unlike Burgess, no regular pattern could be found where spin-off districts were located in relation to each other.

  The entry on Multi-Centered Metropolitan Regions argues, in contrast to all city-centered approaches, that the separate centers are functionally differentiated and not linked to the larger whole. Malls are not placed around the region at random, they are located by their developers according to marketing or service areas that have nothing to do with the CBD, but are dependent, instead, on the population distribution of the entire metro region. For Burgess, Hoyt, Harris and Ullman, and I should add many urbanists today, the CBD remains an all-purpose shorthand concept for economic concentration within a city. This view of urban space is false. Multiple centers are spread throughout the metro region and are produced and sustained by regional, national and global modes of societal organization.

  CENTRAL PLACE THEORY AND GROWTH POLE THEORY

  European urban and regional economists and geographers have been influenced by the work of two German regional scientists, Christaller (1933) and Lösch (1945), who are credited with the invention of central place theory. At its simplest, central place theory offers an explanation for two kinds of urban phenomena: the existence of an urban hierarchy, i.e. the ranking of cities from ones with the most functions and importance to those with the least; and the spatial structure of the urban system – in other words, the relationship between different cities in a region (Evans, 1985). Originally based on a study of southern Germany that was predominantly rural, central place theory has been weak on explaining the existence of an urban hierarchy in industrialized economies. Despite criticism and reworking, central place theory in the context of other theoretical developments does offer insights into the formation of Multi-Centered Metropolitan Regions (MMRs) and the earlier variant, Polycentric Urban Regions (PURs) once used in Europe. Its other utility has been to explain the hierarchy of financial services offered within the urban system of a country (Parr and Budd, 2000).

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