H. G. Wells on the Diffusion of Great Cities

摘要

The economic forces making for concentration of population into large cities and, later, deconcentration into suburbs, urban fringes, and satellite towns are familiar themes in economic geography, formalized in the economics of location by such theorists as Alfred Weber, August Losch, and Walter Christaller. Abstracting from the economics, substantial insight into these processes can be gained simply by looking at transport technology and the daily commuting options thereby made possible. The passages reproduced below, from a 1901 essay by H. G. Wells, provide an early illustration of this proposition. Wells neatly spans fact and forecast to depict a spreading-out of large cities over the course of the twentieth century. Shape and extent are governed by geography and travel times, but overall population size is also constrained by what would now be termed the city's footprint. "Each great city is sustained finally by the trade and production of a certain proportion of the world's surface-by the area it commands commercially." It cannot grow beyond that limit "except as a result of some quite morbid and transitory process-to be cured at last by famine and disorder." (The ultimate sizes of the urban agglomerations Wells anticipates-ranging up to 40million or so in population, albeit at low average densities-now look extravagant. Today's largest city, by the UN's measure, is Tokyo at 36 million and unlikely to grow further. No other city is above 20 million, although by 2025 eight are projected toreach or exceed that level. Hankou, Wells's exemplar of a great city, is not one of them. It is part of present-day Wuhan, whose current population is still below 10 million.) But in another of Wells's apercus, technological developments are expected tosteadily efface the contrast between urbanity and rusticity.