5 - Corporation, class, and city system

Summary

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

Italo Valcino, Invisible Cities

Introduction

The composition and growth of territorial communities have been theorized to depend upon their position within larger systems of such communities. Thus analyses of cities and regions have increasingly moved from focussing on attributes of places toward the study of the relations among them. In this chapter, we review past conceptions of the city system in market economies – conceptions that we argue are not appropriate for advanced Western societies like the United States. We then present an alternative conception of the US city system, examine its determinants, and consider how a city's position in this system affects its growth.

Activity without actors

Various mechanisms governing the relationships among places have been studied. Whether conceptualized as exchange, function or industry, these mechanisms are all based upon some form of activity.

In central place theory, places are linked to one another in spatially segregated, hierarchically ordered market areas. Higher-order, more central places produce for lower-order, less central places, each higher-order place exchanging its goods and services with hinterlands of ever larger extent.