Systems Of Urban Places

A method of “structural chains” is proposed for the analysis of regional urban systems. Each chain is made up of a sequence of numerical elements representing the average population of places at various levels of urban development, from small mining or forestry settlements to large polyfunctional cities of regional or national rank. The absence of a particular category in a region is marked in the chain by a zero. The structural chains of local urban systems can be grouped into tables reflecting the structure of a regional urban system and its local variations. The key characteristics of urban systems reflected by these chains are: the number of elements or levels of development; the number of zeros and their position in the chain, reflecting the degree of development of the urban hierarchy; and the height of the regional tables (number of horizontal rows), representing the number of local urban structures. The method is tested and illustrated by the urban systems of the Dnieper-Donets and Black Sea regions of the Ukraine, the Upper Volga region, and the urban system of the Tatar ASSR.     

Patent Places: Size Matters

In this paper I investigate the United States urban system of technical advance by analysis of metropolitan patent data. Residents of metropolitan areas obtain most of the patents awarded to Americans and the largest areas predominate, signifying that urbanization externalities facilitate invention. The advantages of large areas arise from lopsided concentrations of technologically intensive manufacturing and an uneven distribution of well-educated people. Location with respect to the traditional manufacturing belt also plays a role. Metropolitan residents in the manufacturing belt remain the most industrious inventors. The contribution of leading educational and research institutions to technical advance is manifest in small urban centers and outside the traditional manufacturing belt.     

意大利访古

<正>意大利是个多姿多彩、令人神往的国家。看欧洲地图,意大利的版图形状像一只女人的高筒高跟皮靴伸向地中海。人们对这个国度的兴趣会因各自的偏爱而不同:热衷体育的人欣赏意大利的足球——他们曾三次夺得大力神杯。国家队的21号皮尔洛是钢铁大亨的儿子,他踢球的工资全部捐给非洲难民基金会。这个国家,尤其到了大的赛季,各种色彩都不足以渲染人们的热情。艺术爱好者则推崇意大利的绘画、雕塑和建筑艺术,认为意大利的歌剧名扬四     

On Female Presences and Absences in Heavenly Places

James (Oceania 1991) criticizes some of my interpretive proposals on the political ideology of ancient Tonga, claiming that my emphasis on predominantly male relationships in the titular system reduces ‘Polynesian truths’ to ‘Freudian dogma‘. James sees Tonga as a ‘markedly bilateral’ rather than ‘patrilineal’ society, manifesting symptoms of Malinowski's ‘matrilineal complex’, particularly an incestuous fixation on the sister rather than the mother, correlated with the importance of the brother/sister relationship in social structure, and the alleged transmission of rank through females only. James attempts to find evidence for her claims in the origin myth of the titular system. I show that — contrary to her interpretation — no brother/sister incest can be found in this myth, where, moreover, the female presence is subdued and desexualized. My rejoinder raises issues of general anthropological interest in the realms of symbolism, gender, the analysis of political myth, and of the interrelationship of psychological and cultural processes.     

New Indians,new edition

Wendell H. Oswalt. This Land Was Theirs: A Study of the North American Indian, Second Edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973. xx + 617 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $13.00.     

The Spatial Structuring of Central Places

The spatial structuring of “classical” central place systems is the primary concern of this research. Emphasizing the development of such systems from basic spatial relations between centers and hinterland locations (rather than as a result of an underlying geometry of regions), this paper takes an optimization approach to the siting of central places in a single-good system. The objective function is shown to be one that maximizes both market coverage of demand and market overlap. Access to this objective is given through the natural slack covering model.     

Classical Central Places as Protected Thresholds

Previous research efforts demonstrate the use of location covering in the spatial structuring of central places within a single-good context. In a multilevel context, this paper similarly develops a mathematical programming approach to the siting of central places based on the “protection” of inner (or threshold) markets. The objective function maximizes both market coverage of demand and market overlap, subject to an upper bound on market overlap; this allows the formation of different market structures consistent with the various K-valued central place systems of Christaller and Lösch. Siting examples serve to illustrate the working of the protected threshold model in isotropic settings. Furthermore, ways in which the present model might be extended for other situations are examined.     

Evaluative Constructions Of Domestic Tourist Places

Personal construct theory was used to study potential tourists' appraisive images of the major Australian domestic tourist destinations. Seven main evaluative constructs (bipolar discriminations) were identified as being commonly used to appraise destinations. The second stage of the research involved the scoring of places on those seven constructs by potential tourists. Principal components analysis of the resultant matrices showed that construct space generally comprised one main dimension which was labelled favourable - unfavourable. An exception was that older women used two dimensions when appraising destinations. These dimensions were labelled frenetic - relaxing and dull -exciting. Respondents distinguished clearly between destinations and the distinctions made were remarkably consistent over different groups of respondents defined on the basis of age, sex, and location.