The Changing Face of Cities

This book provides a focus for the renewed interest in the character of places, a central interest of geographers that for nearly a quarter of a century has been relatively neglected. The main theme is the cyclical character of the process of development and redevelopment. Most attention is devoted to European and North American cities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the concern with the antecedence of landscape change entails some consideration of the legacy that cities have inherited from the pre-industrial era. Viewed at a very general level the thesis that is developed is concerned with the interplay of innovation, constructional activity and accessibility. Taken together these notions provide the basis for a theoretical scheme to which a wide variety of aspects of the development of the physical form of cities are related. At a more detailed level this framework is supplemented and to some extent substantiated by historic-geographical accounts of individual cities and parts of cities, based largely on the author's research.