Term Paper on Towns and Its Classification | World | Geography

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1. Term Paper on Administrative Towns:

Administrative towns include not only capital cities of countries, but all the centres of provinces, states, districts and other admin­istrative divisions of the country. In many countries quite small towns and even large villages have some administrative functions but it is chiefly in capital cities that administration is the major activity.

Some towns, such as London, may gradually acquire their administrative functions by being the largest town in the country and the home of the Royal family. But some capitals have been newly created for historical, political or strategic reasons, and these towns, such as Islamabad in Pakistan, Ottawa in Canada, or Canberra in Australia, may be smaller than the major ports or industrial towns in the country. They also differ from ‘traditional’ capitals in being planned and built with their administrative function clearly in mind and this may inhibit the growth of other functions.

Administrative towns are concerned mainly with public administration and contain many public build­ings, ministries and offices, and usually the head offices of state-run organizations such as banks, post offices, and railways.

The capital is usually the headquarters of other organizations such as societies, educational institutions, political parties and charities. Because of the concentration of administrative functions busi­ness enterprises often find it convenient to establish their own head offices in capitals and this adds to the proliferation of offices.

Apart from administration, one of the chief functions of such towns is to house civil servants and other office workers. The concen­tration of public buildings, parks and sporting facili­ties tends to make capitals tourist centres, especially those older-established capitals which also have royal palaces, cathedrals, mosques, temples and other nota­ble buildings.

In newly planned capitals the emphasis is often laid on the pleasant surroundings of the town, and parks and gardens are major features. New buildings are often built in striking styles in order to make the town as distinctive as possible. This is not always true of older capitals.

In some capitals trade and industry are well-established and the town has both administrative and indus­trial sectors, but, especially in new capitals such as Islamabad or Canberra, industrial activity is strictly supervised so that the appearance of the town is not adversely affected.

In older capitals trade and indus­try have long flourished, attracted by the large market and labour supply of the capital city. Some industries are particularly associated with administrative towns and among these is printing and publishing, including newspaper production. Prestige industries such as fashion and jewellery may also be found.

2. Term Paper on Defensive Towns:

The days are past in most countries when almost every town had a defensive function, protecting its own people and those of the surrounding countryside. But most countries main­tain armies, navies and air forces and certain towns are noted as garrison towns, naval dockyards and air bases. Such towns may have barracks, training facili­ties for the armed forces, airfields, or special docks and harbours for naval vessels.

Garrison towns are usually less important for other functions; for exam­ple Portsmouth and Plymouth in England; or Hali­fax, Nova Scotia, Canada are not important as general ports. Originally chosen for their sheltered and easily defended harbours and strategic position, they now have a tradition of naval functions, and besides the military installations there are many commercial firms which provide naval supplies, ships provisions and so forth.

Army headquarters have also evolved into tradi­tional centres, e.g. Aldershot in England, but air forces are of more recent inception. Many military airfields tend to be rather isolated in country districts because of the need for space to lay out the airfield, hangars and barrack buildings. Salisbury Plain in southern England is noted for its many military establishments, but has few large towns.

In addition to the garrison towns within a country and the various necessary training establishments, some countries maintain garrisons abroad. There are British and American garrison towns in Germany in­cluding such places as Munster and Osnabruck as well as Berlin. Malaysian towns with a strong military ele­ment are Butterworth and Kota Tinggi, where there is a Jungle Warfare School.

In many garrison towns there is a clear division of land-use between the civil and military authorities, so that the military installations are often at a little dis­tance from the town, or are grouped together in one part of the town. This is necessary to main­tain security, though often many townspeople are employed by the military.

3. Term Paper on Cultural Centres:

Many towns have cul­tural functions such as the provision of education, art galleries or religious buildings, but some towns have culture as their major function. In the field of educa­tion examples are Cambridge, England and Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University); Heidelburg, Germany; Leiden, Netherlands; and Akademgorod, near Novosi­birsk, U.S.S.R. Oxford was also once solely based on education but has now developed many industries.

Educational towns, apart from university and college buildings, playing fields and libraries, are also distinc­tive because they have a range of shops catering for the needs of students and teachers, including many bookshops and shops selling sports equipment and insignia such as gowns. The university is sometimes mingled with the town but in newer university towns the campus is often on the outskirts of the town in separate grounds.

Entertainment functions are found in most towns, particularly capitals and resorts, but some towns are noted for their theatres, e.g. Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare; or for other cul­tural functions such as film-making, e.g. Hollywood, California (though fewer films are made there now­adays); or film festivals, e.g. Cannes in southern France.

Religious centres are of several types. They may be the seat of religious leaders, e.g. Rome, the residence of the Pope, or Lhasa, once the seat of the Dalai Lama of Tibet; or they may be centres of pilgrimage, such as Jerusalem, Mecca or Varanasi (Benares). Smaller towns such as Lourdes in southern France are also centres of pilgrimage since they have associations with particular saints or miracles.

Towns where religion is important have many religious buildings, specialist shops selling religious books and pictures, or supply­ing candles or joss sticks. They also provide accom­modation for pilgrims and often have subsidiary func­tions as tourist centres.

4. Term Paper on Collection Centres:

The towns which fall in this category are the mining towns, fishing ports and lumbering centres where raw materials are obtained and may be refined to some extent, but where there are few, if any, other industries or major activities. Mining towns may be based on precious metals like gold or silver, on industrial metals such as iron, copper, tin, bauxite (aluminium) or zinc, on minerals such as asbestos, salt, kaolin, potash, sulphur, or brick-clay, or on fuel supplies such as coal, oil or natural gas.

The towns which serve these mines may be small set­tlements serving a particular mine, like some of the smaller towns in northern Canada, or may be large towns serving a whole mining district, like Ipoh in the tin-rich Kinta Valley of Malaysia, or Johannesburg in the midst of the Witwatersrand goldfields of South Africa.

Such towns may have some industries related to the mineral mined, such as smelters, refineries or concentration plants, and traders in the town may spe­cialize in the provision of mining equipment or special clothing needed by miners, but in all but the largest centres, where population growth has attracted other industries, the sole function is to mine and ship out the mineral by road, rail, pipeline or sea.

The appearance of mining towns is often dominated by open-cast pits, e.g. Kiruna in northern Sweden, or by pit-head gear where the mines are underground as in the coal mining towns of northern England. Many mining towns are also surrounded by unsightly tip heaps of tailings or stockpiles of the mineral itself.

Underground working may cause subsidence in min­ing towns so that houses have to be evacuated and in some cases where the minerals extend under the town itself houses have to be demolished to allow open-cast mining to proceed, e.g. at Thetford Mines (asbestos) in Canada; Yallourn (coal), Australia.

Fishing ports are also collecting centres and spe­cialize accordingly. They may be a base for small boats which go to sea every day or they may be used by larger vessels which stay at sea for days or weeks, but they have many features in common. They are usually grouped fairly closely round the harbour and have facilities for landing, storing, cleaning, drying, pack­ing and dispatching the fish, as well as canneries, fer­tilizer plants, fish-meal plants or freezing plants in some cases. In many fishing ports other related activi­ties such as boat building, net making or repairing, the making of barrels, boxes and other fishing equip­ment are also found.

Towns in lumbering areas are collecting centres for the logs, which may be brought in by railway or lorry or may be floated down-river to the town. Their func­tions are to collect and partly process the wood and they often have many sawmills. Some may also have plants for making pulp and paper and some may have wood-based manufacturing industries such as furni­ture-making but this is unusual.

If timber collecting towns are on the coast they will also have docks and loading facilities for exporting the timber, either in log or sawn form. For example the timber towns of Tawau and Sandakan in Sabah, Malaysia, ship much timber to Japan and other countries. In Newfound­land, Canada, Grand Falls and Corner Brook are tim­ber towns with pulp and paper industries.

Lumbering towns are found in all the countries where coniferous forests are widespread, i.e. Canada, the U.S.A., Scan­dinavia, especially Finland, and the U.S.S.R. They are increasingly found in countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Burma and Thailand with resources of tropical forests. Though tropical woods are unsuitable for paper-making they include valuable hardwoods such as teak.

Many forest-based towns nowadays are concerned not only with collecting the timber but also with re­placing it as conservation of forests becomes more and more important. Thus many lumbering towns have tree nurseries or research centres in addition to their log-ponds and sawmills.

5. Term Paper on Production Centres:

Production centres are those towns where some kind of manufacturing industry is the major function. The type of industry carried out in the town may well affect its appearance, size and layout. For instance a town such as Pittsburgh making iron and steel will be dominated by large steel­works, while a town which specializes in the production of electrical goods may have neat, clean factories on spacious industrial estates.

Many industrial towns are still sited on coalfields and though coal is used less and less as a source of power, the use of coal over many years has black­ened the buildings, and the skyline of towns such as Halifax in northern England is marked by the chim­neys of factory buildings.

In such old industrial towns, too, small ‘back-to-back’ houses were built by factory- owners to house their workers. These small and ugly homes are now often very dilapidated. This type of urban landscape is found in most older industrial cen­tres, such as northern England, northern France, south­ern Belgium and in parts of eastern North America. These towns grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution when population was flooding into the towns and had to be housed cheaply and quickly in small, and nowadays unsatisfactory, dwellings.

In towns where industrial development is more recent, facto­ries are more likely to use oil, gas or electricity to power their machines and the resulting towns and industrial estates will be cleaner and less crowded. In many Asian towns and cities, where the development of industry is being encouraged, small low-cost dwel­lings are being built to house the workers. In the future these too may have to be replaced by better homes as the standard of living rises.

For manufacturing towns, as for collecting centres, transport for the raw materials and the finished goods is very important and lines of transportation are im­portant features of industrial towns. In fact now­adays some industrial plants would rather set up on lines of communication than in established towns. In Japan for example there is much industrial develop­ment along the motorway between Tokyo and Osaka.

Industrial establishments may be grouped in a par­ticular section of the town, particularly in the case of towns with new industrial estates, or may be scattered through it. Similarly a town may have a wide range of industries, like Birmingham in England, or it may rely almost solely on a single large company to employ its population like Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A., the ‘Kodak city’.

Manufacturing towns often tend to specialize, so that some towns have several factories producing similar products. Some towns are noted for textile manufacture, e.g. the woollen towns of Halifax, Brad­ford and Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England or the motor manufacturing towns of Detroit, Toledo and Windsor in the U.S.A. and Canada.

There are several reasons for this. Raw materials may be available in the area or may once have been, and have given rise to a traditional industry in the town. Alter­natively specialization in one town may lead to the manufacture of components for the product in a near­by town, and similar advantages of proximity may eventually lead to several towns in an area specializing in different processes of the same industry.

This was originally the case in Lancashire where cotton spin­ning was done in some towns, weaving in others and finishing in others again. Nowadays, however, many large companies find that vertical integration of pro­cesses, i.e. the processing from raw materials to finished goods by a single firm, is more economical. Where specialization does take place the appearance of the town is affected by the prominence of particular types of factories.

6. Term Paper on Transfer and Distribution Centres:

Most towns have an important proportion of their people employed in trade, but many have other func­tions in addition. Towns which are concerned with the transfer and distribution of goods, however, have trade as their major function. They include several types of towns.

(a) Market towns:

Market towns are characterized not only by open or covered markets but also by a wide range of shops and stores, and sometimes by ware­houses and wholesaling districts. The commercial cen­tres of market towns are generally larger than those of towns with other functions. In addition market towns usually have a number of banks, insurance com­panies and other financial organizations.

Towns whose marketing functions are on a world scale because they handle essential commodities such as tea, rubber, wool or metals have a wide range of finance houses, banks, offices and sometimes a stock exchange.

Because trade is the chief function of market towns transport facilities are also important. The town must be able to obtain goods easily and shoppers must be able to reach the market and stores from a wide sur­rounding area. Towns such as Norwich in England or Kumasi in Ghana, have roads and railways radiating in all directions.

The variety of goods passing through market towns often gives rise to industrial development based on some of the goods handled. If this happens the indus­trial plants tend to be located on the outskirts of the town, while the centre is given over to commercial activities.

(b) Ports:

By far the most important trading and distribution centres are ports, and such are their ad­vantages that a large proportion of the world’s largest cities, including Tokyo, New York, London, Calcutta, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and Sydney are seaports.

There are also many important inland ports on lakes and rivers including Hankou (Hankow) on the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), St. Louis on the Mississippi and Cleveland on Lake Erie. Because of their advantages for trade, and because they import and export basic commodities, ports are major finan­cial and industrial centres.

They are characterized not only by port facilities such as docks, harbours, ware­houses and transport facilities, such as roads and rail­ways, necessary for distributing the goods, but also by large commercial sectors with shops, offices and financial institutions. Surrounding the core of the port are usually broad residential and industrial districts.

Not all ports have similar functions. Several distinct types of port can be recognized:

i. General ports:

These ports deal with a variety of cargoes and may also have passenger facilities or engage in fishing. They may be fairly small ports such as Kuching or Malacca in Malaysia or Lobito in Angola, or they may be major ports such as Hamburg or Mar­seilles.

ii. Passenger ports:

These ports, while dealing with some general cargoes, specialize in handling passenger shipping. They have specialized dock facilities and deep water to accommodate the large liners. They also have good, fast rail or road links with major urban centres. Many also have tourist functions themselves, especially when they are ports-of-call on holiday cruise routes, like Hamilton, Bermuda; Kingston, Jamaica; and Funchal, Madeira, Passenger ports also include Southampton and Cherbourg at the eastern end of the North Atlantic route.

iii. Packet stations:

These ports are terminals of ferries which ply across narrow seas such as the Eng­lish Channel, the Baltic and the North Sea. They cater largely for passengers though ‘roll on-roll off vehicle ferries are more and more important. Like other pas­senger ports, they must have good road and rail links with larger centres. Ferry ports usually come in pairs, one at either terminal. They include Dover and Calais; Newhaven and Dieppe; Harwich and Esbjerg (Den­mark); and Helsingor (Denmark) and Helsingborg (Sweden).

iv. Outports:

The chief function of outports is to handle shipping which cannot reach the main port because of silting or because the ships are too large. Thus Cuxhaven serves Hamburg, and Avon- mouth serves Bristol. The bulky nature of many of the goods handled at these ports leads to the develop­ment of ample warehouse and other storage facilities and goods may be processed on the spot leading to industrial development. But because they are off­shoots of larger ports, commercial and financial func­tions may be less well developed than in major ports.

v. Entrepôt ports:

The function of entrepôt ports is to import goods from one country for re-export to another country, rather than for distribution within the immediate hinterland of the port. Some of the world’s largest ports, including Rotterdam and Singa­pore have this function.

Such ports are characterized by commodious warehouse facilities for storing the goods while they are in transit and by financial concerns such as banks, insurance agencies, shipping companies and trading companies. Entrepôts which serve landlocked countries, such as Rotterdam, may also be major transhipment points where goods are transferred from ocean shipping to river and canal barges or other smaller craft.

Entrepôts may also be major industrial centres where raw materials imported from one country are processed before being exported elsewhere. Both Singapore and Rotterdam import crude petroleum, for instance, and export refined pe­troleum products. Other activities, dependent on the large concentration of shipping in the ports, include shipbuilding and repairing, marine engineering, refuel­ling, watering and provisioning of shipping.

vi. Tidewater industrial towns:

Some ports are engaged solely in the import of certain goods such as crude petroleum, iron or other metal ores, which are processed on the spot. The port function may be less important in such towns than the industrial function.

In some cases the oil or ore is unloaded not at a port as such but at a jetty belonging to the oil refinery, e.g. Fawley on Southampton Water, England, or of the aluminium smelter, e.g. Kitimat, Canada. Such towns can hardly be considered true ports and some isolated plants are not even located in towns.

Naval ports and fishing ports are two other types of port which have already been dealt with under col­lection centres and defensive towns.

(c) Financial towns:

In some towns the major function is finance rather than trade or distribution of goods. Such towns include Frankfurt in Germany; Zurich in Switzerland; Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and Beirut in Lebanon. Certain sections of other cities may have finance as a dominant function, e.g. Wall Street, New York, or the City of London. These towns and cities have stock-markets, auction rooms, and numerous offices, financial houses, banks, and com­mercial agencies.

7. Term Paper on Resorts:

Resorts are those towns which cater for the recreational needs of people in the surround­ing areas or countries. They may be based on health-giving waters, seaside recreation, mountain climbing or skiing, on cultural attractions such as an­cient buildings, entertainment or sports facilities, or on attractive scenery.

The towns that grow up to cater for tourists and holidaymakers have many features in common. They have many hotels to accommodate visitors, they pro­vide sporting facilities such as golf courses, swimming pools, ski-training schools and so on.

They have numerous entertainment facilities such as thea­tres, cinemas, night-clubs, amusement parks and children’s playgrounds and they have a good range of shopping facilities as most tourists like to buy sou­venirs, postcards, or specialized equipment or clothing for their sporting activities, such as skis or mountain climbing gear.

In many resort towns the chief attraction is often the point on which the town centres, e.g. the Pump Room in eighteenth century spas or the seaside ‘prom­enade’ at most seaside-resorts. Hotels are concentrated near the sea or with good views of surrounding moun­tain scenery, and shopping arcades and gift shops are concentrated near hotels and near the major points of interest such as churches or temples.

Thus resort towns often have clear divisions between the tourist section and that part of the town used by local resi­dents, and this is even more marked when many of the houses or shops are only used in summer and are shut up for the rest of the year, as is often the case in Europe.

Resorts have been important in Europe since the eighteenth century and are thus better developed there than in many other parts of the world, but more and more underdeveloped countries are hoping to take advantage of the tourist trade. Thus resorts are a type of town which is rapidly increasing in numbers.

The range of facilities offered and the range of tourist at­tractions which cause the growth of resorts may both change and increase in the future. One field which is expanding at present is the viewing of ‘big game’, and this is transforming national parks in East African countries and in some Asian countries into tourist cen­tres. Town development has not yet taken place in most such areas however.

A subsidiary function of some old-established re­sorts in Britain, Europe and North America is the provision of residential areas for retired people. In some British seaside resorts almost half the popula­tion is over 60 years of age, e.g. in Eastbourne and Bexhill on the south coast.

8. Term Paper on Residential Towns:

In some towns the chief function is simply to house a concentration of popu­lation. In such towns the vast majority of the urban area will be occupied by homes and gardens and the commercial section may be rather small in comparison. However, large increases in population are usually matched by some expansion of commercial activi­ties.

The towns which fall into this category include suburbs and small towns or villages on the outskirts of large cities, such as Croydon or Richmond south of London, which have been overtaken by urban devel­opment, and dormitory towns such as Brighton where commuters have their homes but not their work.

To some extent New Towns and overspill towns are also residential as they are created to house the excess population of large cities, but such towns, e.g. Harlow or Cumbernauld in Britain, Petaling Jay a in Malaysia, also have industrial estates which provide work for some, though not all, of the residents.

Residential towns are characterized not only by the large proportion of their land devoted to housing, but also by the proliferation of road and rail links with the major cities, which enable the commuters to get to work each day.

Towns of Diversified Function:

Towns are classified according to their major functions so that many towns in which a large number of activities are all important, such as London, New York or Paris, are difficult to put into a definite class. Such towns are referred to as diversified in function. Even when one function is dominant it is important to remember that most towns have a number of subsidiary functions and these have to be taken into account when assess­ing the advantages of site and situation.

For example, collecting and trading towns often have some indus­tries, manufacturing towns have some trading activi­ties and capitals often have a wide range of functions including trade, finance and tourism.

The functions of towns, like their physical struc­ture, are subject to change and this often makes their sites disadvantageous. For instance defensive sites often become restrictive when the town expands. Thus many towns have restricted centres which were once confined within the town walls and more extensive suburbs which grew up outside the walls or after the walls were demolished.

Functional changes sometimes add new functions, as when a large port becomes a capital city, or when a capital becomes a tourist centre, but changes are some­times to the disadvantage of a town. Such changes are often unavoidable, as when a river channel silts up and deprives a town, e.g. Chester, of its port func­tions, but they are sometimes the result of policy, as when a new capital is built and the old capital is deprived of many of its administrative functions, e.g. Valencia was the first capital of Venezuela but it lost its capital functions later to Caracas. But towns are less likely than villages to change their sites because of such set-backs.

The concentration of buildings, roads, water supplies and so on makes it very difficult for towns to move, especially in modern times, so that it is usually more convenient to improve a town’s site or situation by man-made means, e.g. by improving roads to create better transport facilities or by reclaiming land to overcome crowding, or dredging channels or even moving obstructions like small hills to create more building land.

Some towns have changed their sites in the past but these have mostly been small towns which have moved from dry hilltops to more advan­tageous sites on the valley floor when the need for de­fence was past, e.g. Old Sarum was almost abandoned when its inhabitants built the new town of Salisbury in southern England in medieval times. Similarly, great disasters like floods or earthquakes have sometimes led to the rebuilding of towns on new sites, but much more often, even in the most dangerous circumstances such as on fault-lines or in the paths of volcanic erup­tions, towns have simply been reconstructed in the same place.

For instance San Francisco, California, which was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, is near the San Andreas fault and might suffer another major earthquake at any time. Managua, the capital of Nica­ragua, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1972. Only a few large, modern concrete buildings remain stand­ing in the city centre today.

The city is being rebuilt in the same place but the destruction of the old town is allowing planners to provide more open space and more space between houses, not only to improve liv­ing conditions but also because it will be safer when the next earthquake strikes. Disasters, therefore, as well as urban renewal, town planning and road build­ing, often affect the internal structure of towns far more than their actual site or position.