Classification of Town Situations | World | Human Geography

The situation of a town is its relationship with the surrounding region. Most town situations can be clas­sified in one of three classes; they are linear, frontier or central situations. Linear situations are usually those whose main advantages are those of trade and transport. Towns grow up at specific points along lines of communication. Frontier situations are those in which a town is situated at the borders of two or more types of land from which it can draw a variety of goods.

Towns with central situations are those at points which, because of their focal position, are easily reached from all directions and which in turn can exert their influence over a wide radius.

Within each category there are of course a number of varia­tions and these will be examined in greater detail:

1. Linear Situations:

Most towns have grown up because of their favourable situation with regard to trading routes. They may be at places where stops must be made or changes must take place in the mode of transport, or they may be at points on a route where other routes cross or converge with it.

(a) Halts and caravanserais:

Among the earliest and simplest kinds of towns, some of which are still important, were the small settlements which grew up at points along an established route where traders mov­ing along the road habitually stopped for the night because of the availability of water and perhaps food supplies.

At such points settlements might provide lodgings for the men, stables for the animals and per­haps storage facilities for the goods. These small towns would be scattered along routes at distances usually covered in a day’s journey.

Very many of them grew up in the Middle East and Central Asia on trading routes which were in use from the earliest times, but the coming of more modern forms of transport has made many of them unnecessary as much greater dis­tances can now be travelled without halts.

Some such towns, however, have become well-established, espec­ially in desert areas where much trade is still carried on by caravans. Examples are Azraq in Jordan, Agades in Niger and numerous other oasis settlements.

A more modern example of this kind of settlement is the small town on a major route which relies to some extent on ‘passing trade’, that is people stopping for meals, drinks or perhaps for the night. Many such towns have developed in Europe and North America from old Stage Coach halts.

For instance towns along the Great North Road in England, such as Grantham, have many hotels and restaurants for this reason. In some cases the construction of a new road which by­passes an existing town can draw traders away from the old town to a more advantageous situation. Two such towns on the main north-south road of Peninsu­lar Malaysia are Tapah Road, west of Tapah and Kuala Kubu Road west of Kuala Kubu Bahru.

Ports-of-call on rather inhospitable coasts may also be included in this category. They are built to serve long-distance shipping, providing water, food and fuel. They were once more important, especially when sea traffic between European countries and their former colonies was greater. Cape Town, South Africa was established by the Dutch to serve ships on their way to the East Indian colonies (now Indonesia) and began as a farming community.

It later served British ship­ping en route to India. Aden on the Red Sea was a later port-of-call on the way to India; Colombo on the way to Singapore and the Far East. Oceanic islands often still serve this purpose for both shipping, e.g. Hawaii, St. Helena, and air transport, e.g. Gan air base in the Indian Ocean.

(b) Constriction or obstruction of routes:

Towns often grow up where otherwise easy routeways meet an obstacle such as rapids in a river, or where several roads and railways make use of a single narrow pass or gap through highlands. This is also true of sea- routes and many large ports are built on narrow straits where they command shipping. Citizens of such towns used to exact tolls from passing ships.

There are many examples of this type of town, including Copenhagen on the narrow Sound between Denmark and Sweden at the entrance to the Baltic Sea; Istanbul on the Dar­danelles channel from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea; Penang, Malacca and Singapore on the Strait of Malacca; and Gibraltar and Tangier on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar at the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea.

Where rivers flow through constricted gorges towns also grow up and may take tolls from passing boats, e.g. on the Rhine Gorge in Germany or on the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) River in China where Ichang is a gorge town. Towns where rivers enter or leave lakes also take advantage of the constriction of the broad lake route into a narrow river channel. Such towns include Geneva in Switzerland, and Kingston, Ontario at the point where the St. Lawrence River leaves Lake Ontario.

Mountain passes or gaps through ranges of hills channel lines of communication and are thus favoura­ble situations for towns. Calgary, Canada, is situated at the foot of the Rockies below the Kicking Horse Pass; Mendoza, Argentina, is at the foot of the Uspallata Pass across the southern Andes; and Kabul, Af­ghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan, are at either end of the route across the famous Khyber Pass.

In some ways oasis towns in the deserts have a simi­lar reason for growth because they are necessary stages on a desert journey; traders and travellers must pass through them in order to obtain fresh supplies of water and food.

(c) Transhipment points:

At points where goods have to be transferred from one type of vehicle to an­other a town is very likely to be built. The delay caused by the changeover, the need for warehouse facilities, the provision of the various types of trans­port required and the provision of labour to load and unload cargoes, all lead to the growth of towns in such positions. Transhipment points are of a number of kinds.

i. River crossings:

Before bridges were built and in places where bridges are still not available, rivers had to be crossed by fords or ferries. Goods and passengers, had to be transferred to boats to cross the river. Until 1968, for instance, the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) in China had not been bridged at Nanjing (Nanking) and goods and passengers had to be ferried across the river at this point to link road and rail routes on either side.

Towns established on ferry sites may lose this ad­vantage when bridges are built, but they retain their significance as nodal points at the convergence of road or rail with river routes.

ii. Mountain and desert crossings:

In mountainous regions towns may develop at points where wheeled vehicles can no longer penetrate and further progress must be made on foot or by mule, donkey or horse. This was the origin of a number of Alpine towns such as Chur and Lucerne in Switzerland and Bolzano in Italy, though roads have since been built across the passes. Such towns, however, still have great impor­tance in the Andes, which are crossed by few roads, and in the Himalayas, e.g. Pokhara and Nawakot in Nepal.

A similar transhipment from vehicles to camels sometimes occurs at the desert margins and is one of the reasons for the existence of a line of towns along the desert fringe in West Africa, including Zinder in Niger and Timbuktu in Mali.

iii. Heads of navigation:

At many points on rivers and canals transhipment from larger to smaller craft is necessary. In the early days of European settlement in North America large vessels could not go up the St. Lawrence River beyond Montreal and from that point goods were transported inland by canoes which plied the Great Lakes and wound their way along rivers into central Canada and the Mid-West of the U.S.A.

As canals were gradually improved large ships were able to penetrate further inland so that today sea-going vessels can reach the western end of Lake Superior. On smaller rivers transhipment may be required at the absolute head of navigation, often marked by rapids, beyond which no boat can go.

iv. Portages:

Falls and rapids cause obstruction in rivers, and though they sometimes mark the head of navigation, it is often possible to continue by boat above the falls. Where this is the case a portage is re­quired; goods must be unloaded and carried by land to a point where they can be reloaded on to a river vessel.

On the Great Lakes, for example, the Niagara Falls and the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie were circumvented by portages before the Welland and Soo Canals were built. At Kinshasa, Zaire, falls interrupt the River Zaire, but above the falls there is a long stretch of navigable water. On the Orinoco River in Venezuela the Maipures Rapids are avoided by a road and at this point the town of Puerto Ayacucho has grown up.

v. Ports:

The most important transhipment points are those at which ocean navigation ends and goods must be unloaded into smaller craft or on to land trans­port. At these points ports grow up. Ocean navigation may end at the coast itself and ports may be sited on bays or other sheltered stretches of water. In some places the head of oceanic navigation does not even reach the shore.

On the coast of West Africa for in­stance the water is rather shallow and large vessels have to anchor off shore and unload into lighters which carry the goods to the ports such as Accra and Lagos. The ports in this case have grown at the nearest point on the shore to the anchorage. New deep-water ports such as Takoradi in Ghana help to overcome this dif­ficulty. In other areas, e.g. the Persian Gulf, and off Brunei, where the main cargo is oil, shipping which cannot approach the coast is loaded by pipeline.

Usually, however, ports are located on the lower reaches of rivers and on major estuaries. In many cases the head of ocean navigation is influenced by tides, which, flowing up the rivers at certain times of day, allow shipping to penetrate further inland. Many major ports grew up on tidal estuaries including London, Bristol, Hull and Southampton in Britain, and Quebec and Montreal in Canada.

In many places the range of ocean navigation has been extended inland by canals,
e.g. in the Great Lakes or by the Manches­ter Ship Canal which makes Manchester a port, or the North Sea Canal which links Amsterdam to the sea now that the Ijsselmeer has been closed by a dyke.

The head of ocean navigation has changed on many rivers over the years. In some cases this is due to the silting of rivers which has made the channels shallower or unreliable. Some towns which were once ports like Chester in England have lost this function, while others like Malacca on the Strait of Malacca, have been re­duced to handling smaller craft.

The other reason for changes in the head of navigation is the development over the centuries of larger and larger vessels. The ves­sels which first used ports such as London, Hamburg or Rotterdam were tiny in comparison with present- day shipping.

Most of the world’s great ports, however, had al­ready become so well-established that this has made little difference to their sites and has only resulted in a deepening of channels, the construction of deep- water berths nearer the sea and the creation of out- ports to serve the main ports.

At Rotterdam for instance, the New Waterway was cut to link the port to the sea. Later new docks were constructed on the seaward side of the port. Today development is con­centrated not at Rotterdam itself but at Europoort at the seaward end of the New Waterway.

At London, too, outports have been developed and here certain outports have particular functions. Shellhaven and the Isle of Grain handle petroleum imports while Tilbury handles more general cargoes. Many other long-established ports, especially in Europe, also have outports, e.g. Bremen has Bremerhaven, Hamburg has Cuxhaven, and Bristol has Avonmouth.

New developments in shipping, particularly the construction of ever larger oil tankers and bulk ore and grain transporters, mean that new specialized ports are continually being developed at points where deep water runs close to the shore. Some such ports have generated town growth but many are too new to have yet caused a population concentration.

It is doubtful whether town development will follow tradi­tional patterns in such new ports as bulk handling of specialized cargoes is highly mechanized and requires few workers and little storage provision. Ports hand­ling general cargoes require much labour for loading and unloading, storage and distribution of the goods as well as a variety of warehouses and stores.

New ports on deep water include oil terminals in remote Bantry Bay in Ireland and Milford Haven in Wales, and ports for the export of ores include Nouad- hibou, which exports Mauritanian iron ore, and Port Hedland which serves the mineral region in Western Australia.

In hitherto underdeveloped and sometimes almost uninhabited regions such ports are more likely to give rise to flourishing towns because people must move to the area to work the port, transact business and serve the mines inland. These people must be housed and thus a town grows up.

In advanced coun­tries however, where new ports are often outports of an older port, or where the main cargo is oil which can be transported to populous areas easily by pipe­line, new town development is less likely to take place. Whatever labour is required will probably be obtained from older towns nearby.

Sometimes, however, the importation of bulk car­goes will lead to the development of industry because this minimizes transport costs. The most notable exam­ples of this are the ‘tidewater’ steelworks towns of eastern U.S.A., including Fairless steelmill to the sea­ward of Philadelphia and Sparrows Point seaward of Baltimore. Petroleum refining, too, is often a coastally situated industry.

(d) Route convergence:

Towns may grow up at any point where two or more routes cross or converge, and the variety of such points is very great. The meet­ing of two similar routes can give rise to- towns, for instance, where two valleys meet in mountainous coun­try, e.g. Innsbruck in Austria, Koblenz in Germany; or at the confluence of two rivers, e.g. Kuala Lumpur at the confluence of the Kelang and Gombak rivers in Malaysia; Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles; or Lyons at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone in France.

Even the convergence of railway routes, though these are of relatively modern origin, has given rise to towns such as Crewe and Swindon in England where track junctions, railway workshops and locomotive engineering works have collected a town around them.

On the other hand routes of different kinds may converge, such as roads or railways and rivers. Where land routes cross water routes by fords, ferries or bridges a town is almost certain to grow up and exam­ples include some of the world’s most famous cities such as London and Paris.

The convergence of land and sea routes is the most obvious route-convergence situation and more than one-third of the world’s large towns are seaports. Some seaports are also situated at a junction with other water-borne routes, such as canals, e.g. Suez and Port Said; or rivers, e.g. Rotterdam which serves as an entrepot port to several European countries. Ports may also be situated at the convergence of sea routes, e.g. Singapore.

Where a large number of road, rail, air and water routes converge on a single town, e.g. Chicago, the town is said to have a nodal or focal posi­tion and this is best considered under central rather than linear situations.

2. Frontier Situations:

Many towns have grown up at a point on the border between two con­trasting areas. This is an advantageous situation be­cause a town is able to draw different goods from the various areas and act as a trading centre for both. Sometimes a frontier situation divides not different physical or economic regions but areas different because of political or other human factors.

The various frontier situations may be summarized as follows:

(a) Mountain and lowland contact:

The junction between uplands and lowlands is often marked by a line of towns which take advantage of their situation to trade and exchange the products of one region with those of the other. The concentration of a variety of goods at the point of contact also helps to give rise to industrial development.

Examples are Hannover, Leip­zig and Dresden on the southern border of the North German Plain, and Turin, Como, Bergamo, Brescia, and Verona at the foot of the Italian Alps on the North Italian Plain. The edge of mountain ranges is also often marked by a series of falls where rivers descend to the plains, and these have been utilized for power generation, giving towns at such sites an added advantage. For example there is a line of towns at the foot of the Appalachians in eastern North America, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond (Vir­ginia) and Augusta (Georgia).

(b) Polder and dry land contact:

Another junc­tion at which towns have grown up is that between low-lying, once marshy polders and safer, higher land. Towns of this kind include Groningen, Haarlem, Utrecht and The Hague in the Netherlands and Bruges in Belgium.

(c) Desert and savanna junction:

Apart from ad­vantages of transhipment and route convergence at the edges of deserts, towns at this point collect in one place the dates, salt and leather produced in the desert and the crops and livestock of the sayanna lands, and trade is therefore brisk. Craftsmen such as goldsmiths, weavers, dyers and blacksmiths also congregate at such towns making them minor industrial centres. Ex­amples are Timbuktu, Zinder and Kano.

(d) Coasts:

The contact between land and sea is, of course, one of the most important zones of settlement and has many advantages for town and port de­velopment. Towns in such situations can draw goods from at home and overseas on which to base industrial development.

They can also handle both exports and imports and thus have advantages for trade and com­merce. In addition they can exploit the sea itself by fishing. Ports, in addition to being transhipment points, therefore have many advantages for industrial devel­opment.

(e) The frontier of settlement:

Towns may grow up on the borderline between the land which is effec­tively developed and settled in a country and that which still awaits development. For example a series of towns grew up at the railhead in western U.S.A. as settlement pushed west.

These railhead towns became, in succession, as the railways themselves were extended westwards, the chief point at which supplies could be obtained for the isolated western ranches, and for the shipment of cattle east to Chicago and other meat­packing towns. Some of the towns which grew up in this way retain their importance, e.g. Denver, but others flourished for a few years and then declined in importance when the railways were extended to the west coast.

In the U.S.S.R., too, many of the towns of Siberia could be considered as frontier towns as they have been established to encourage settlement in the empty lands east of the Urals. Such towns include Verkho­yansk, Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. Brasilia is another town which has been established in order to attract settlement, in this case to the under-populated interior of Brazil.

(f) Peripheral capital cities:

Political capitals may sometimes be situated on the frontier of settlement, like Brasilia, or they may be situated near the borders of a country. This does not at first sight seem an ideal position for a capital but has several advantages.

Firstly the border areas of a country may be less well con­trolled by the central government than the rest of the country and the establishment of a capital in such an area will create a large concentration of population loyal to the government, enabling the government to keep better control.

Capitals may also be established near borders with disputed territory claimed by the state. An example is the new capital of Pakistan, Is­lamabad, which is in the north of the country not far from the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, part of which is governed by Pakistan. Secondly, expansionist states may establish a capital near the border as a stepping stone to future territorial conquest.

Border capitals may also have advantages for de­fence, and may thus have both defensive sites and defensive situations. The strong concentration of pop­ulation and military strength in a capital make it hard to conquer and thus border capitals make invasion difficult. The position of Beijing (Peking) owes much to strategic defensive advantages.

The series of walls along the old frontier, including the Great Wall of China, and the strongly defended capi­tal were the chief lines of defence against invasion by barbarian Mongols in the past. China has now extended its territory and Beijing (Peking) is no longer close to the border.

Some border capitals owe their position to accident rather than design. For instance, when countries have been created after much town development has already taken place, the largest town might simply be chosen and this town would often be a port. Many South American and African capitals, therefore, have a coastal location, e.g. Lagos, Accra, Lima, Buenos Aires.

Alternatively capitals may once have been centrally located and changes in the shape or size of the country may have given them peripheral posi­tions. Copenhagen, now at the extreme east of Den­mark, was once central when Denmark and southern Sweden were parts of the same country. On the other hand Washington, D.C. was once centrally located among the states of the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. Expansion westwards to the Pacific coast has given it an eccentric position.

One other frontier situation for capitals is also important. This is a frontier between regions within a country. Where rival areas both have towns which could be chosen as a state capital, the solution is often to build a new capital in a neutral position. This was the original situation of Washington, between the ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ states of eastern U.S.A. Another example is Brussels, between the Flemings in the north and the French-speaking Walloons in the south.

3. Central Situations:

Central situations are those at the centre of areas with similar activities and products or those at the focus of a large number of routes which radiate in all directions.

(a) Resource centres:

Some towns grow up at the centre of broad agricultural areas. They act as trading centres if the crops in the region are varied or they may simply act as market centres providing services and selling manufactured goods in areas where farming is the chief occupation.

Examples of such towns are Alor Star in the Kedah plain of northern Peninsular Malaysia, Paris in the centre of the fertile Paris Basin, Kumasi in Ghana, Leipzig in East Germany.

Some towns may grow up at the centre of areas producing a single crop such as coffee or rubber. A town located at the centre of such an area acts as a collecting and processing centre from which goods can be shipped to other parts of the country, or ex­ported overseas.

Sao Paulo in the coffee-growing area of Brazil, or Kuala Lumpur, at the mid-point of the rubber-belt along the western coastal plain of Penin­sular Malaysia, are examples of this type of situation.

Agricultural areas are not the only ones to give rise to such towns. Industrial or mining areas also have their urban centres. In South Africa, Johannesburg is the centre of the gold mining industry and of the gold trade. Ipoh in Malaysia is a similar town, being sur­rounded by tin mining land, and Belo Hori- zonte in the mining state of Minas Gerais in Brazil is another example.

Similarly, Leeds in England acts as a centre for the woollen textiles area of Yorkshire. It is surrounded by textile manufacturing towns but its own industries are based on the finished textiles and the making of garments.

(b) Focal points:

Towns are almost always situated at points where routes converge. Where the lie of the land or the central position of the town favours the convergence of a large number of routes, such towns are said to have a nodal or focal situation. There are many examples of such towns. Paris is at the centre of a network of radiating routes which stretches out to all parts of France.

Buenos Aires has a similar situa­tion in the Pampas of Argentina and Chicago, has a tremendous concentration of road, rail, water and air transport routes. It handles the largest volume of air traffic in the U.S.A. Singapore is a nodal point at which a number of sea-routes converge and this has made it one of the world’s major entrepot ports. Focal points are ideal as centres of trade, transport and industry.

(c) Centrally situated capitals:

A central situation is a good one for a capital because it gives good access to all parts of the country and facilitates administra­tion and control. There are many examples of such capitals including Rome; Moscow, which is at the cen­tre of Russia though not of the U.S.S.R.; and Delhi, which was chosen as the capital of India because it was more central than Calcutta.

In the case of newly- founded capitals such as Delhi, the central position is consciously chosen for its administrative advantages but in the case of older capitals the central position may be a result of the gradual outward expansion of a state’s territorial possessions and power from the original capital or core area of the state.

This was the case with Rome, which became the centre of an enor­mous empire. Berlin was the capital of Germany when the country was more extensive and it is still centrally situated in East Germany.