Geographic Areas of Cities

TaHE great modern city is man's largest and most complex artifact. It contains scores or even hundreds of square miles of rather closely built up land, and is a veritable hive of human activity. It is the supreme focus of the commercial, manufactural, transportational, professional, social, and political life of a large contiguous territory. The central section tends to be a maze of congested, noisy, canyon-like streets between compact rows of towering buildings which are occupied by shops, stores, banks, hotels, offices, and factories. On its margins are terminal districts with many parallel railroad tracts, long strings of cars, steaming locomotives, moving trains, busy passenger and freight stations, spreading warehouses, and large factory buildings. Extensive areas largely occupied by manufacturing plants lie along the water-courses and railroad lines which extend toward the margins of the city; and between them are large stretches of land occupied by associations of old tumble-down houses, flat and apartment houses, small modest homes, luxurious homes, and by streets, parks, playgrounds, and aviation fields. Still farther out are spaces, yet unappropriated by the growing city, of which some are platted and ready for development, some are held for speculative purposes, some are used as market gardens and dairy farms, and here and there about the intersections of important transportation routes are the far-flung suburban or satellite cities with their relatively small business, manufacturing, and residential districts

Economic geography · Geography · Regional science · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · Urbanization and City Planning

• Moscow Markets

  Open Access•N A Koldobskaya, И А Антропов et al.•Regional Research of Russia•2026

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