Great Cities and Their Economic Problems

THE fundamental problem of any area of human occupation is obviously to provide material resources sufficient to secure at least a minimum standard of health and well-being for the inhabitants. Under the simplest conditions of pastoral or agricultural occupation the economic unit was very small, and may indeed have extended little beyond the family; specialisation of productive capacity and the consequent exchange of commodities scarcely existed, and any local grouping or concentration of population that arose was conditioned rather by unusual richness of soil, by human gregariousness, or by the obj ect of common defence, than by recognisable economic factors. Occupation of this type is rare in the world to-day, except among the primitive peoples of a few continental interiors, but it must have been very widespread in the past. From its nature it is unstable in the sense that neither the families dispersed over wide areas nor even the small groups in favoured localities are bound by close ties with particular geographical areas or points: the occupation tends towards the nomadic type, and is the antithesis of settlement taken as implying certain habits of fixed abode. In striking contrast with this elementary type of occupation is the mature and complex form common throughout the greater part of Europe for centuries past and well represented by many regions up and down the civilised world at the present time. The characteristic feature of the latter and familiar kind of occupation is a widespread specialisation of economic activities focussed upon towns which in typical examples serve not only as nodal points for exchange of goods and for intercourse, but often also as centres of intensive production. The towns have come into existence as the concrete expression of economic and other functions' serving the wider fulfilment of the needs and wants of the population group, 1 Towns have been classed according to function into six groups as follows: administrative, defensive, cultural, productive, affording communication, recreative. While most towns combine two or more functions, one function usually overshadows the others

Economic geography · Economics · Historical Economic and Social Studies