A study of Los Angeles, the city of moving pictures. (IV, 6; IX, 1.)
Semple, Ellen. “Some Geographical Causes Determining the Location of Cities,” Jour. School Geog., I (1897), 225–31.
——. Influences of Geographic Environment, on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropogeography (New York, 1911).
A comprehensive work dealing with the factors in the natural environment in relation to the settlement and the activity of man. (III, 2, 3.)
Tower, W. S. “Geography of American Cities,” Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc., XXXVII (1905), 577–88.
Distinguishes between industrial, commercial, political, and social centers and suggests that cities might combine several of these functions. Gives examples of each type, pointing out their distinctive characteristics. (III, 2, 3.)
Wood, Arthur Evans. Some Unsolved Problems of a University Town (Philadelphia, 1920.)
A study of housing, public health, and dependency in Princeton, New Jersey. (VI, 10; VII, 5.)
In the current periodical literature one can find numerous articles dealing with the various functional types of cities of the present day. The National Geographic Magazine has many numbers which are devoted to individual cities from this standpoint.
5. The town, the city, and the metropolis are genetically related concepts which represent three successive stages of an ever widening zone of interrelationships and influences. The town represents a local aggregation which is intimately bound up with a rather narrow surrounding rural periphery. It is the product of limited means of communication and constitutes a more or less self-sustaining economic unit. The city is a more highly specialized unit and, as a result, is a part of a wider interrelated area, while the metropolis tends to become a cosmopolitan unit based upon a relatively high degree of development of the means of communication. The differences between these three urban types is not only expressed in terms of number of inhabitants and area of occupation, but also in social organization and in attitudes. There is a tendency to divide the United States up into provinces according to the zone of influence of the greater metropolitan units dominating the surrounding territory and dependent upon it.