Intensive Urbanisation: Levels, Networks and Central Places

7/28/2019 Intensive Urbanisation: Levels, Networks and Central Places

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Intensive Urbanisation: Levels, Networks and Central Places

Stephen Read

Abstract:

Urbanisation is one of the defining issues of our time, shaping a fast-changingworld, with our urban economies and societies and urban places produced inthe process itself. However the ways we conceive urbanisation leaves a lot ofthis process extremely unclear. Urbanisation is more than the transition ofpeople from rural to urban modes of production and ways of life. It is anhistorical process in which the urban world emerges as a tightly structuredpath-dependant but also non-linear process. The product of this process is aspace, or layering of spaces that challenges the way we think not just of the

city but also of our social grounding in it. Space syntax has gone part of theway to opening a way to our understanding of this process and space. It hasdone this through the way it has represented urban fabrics and theircentralities at a fine grain. However space syntax has become a specialistdiscipline at this fine scale, while most discourse on the city and urbanisationconsiders much larger scales. Here I bring together critical interpretations ofPeter Taylors world-city network, sociotechnical systems and space syntax inorder to propose an interpretation of urban space and scale and a model ofurbanisation that crosses these scale differences.

Key words: urbanisation; world-city networks; space syntax; central places;space; scale.


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Urbanisation: a relational process

Urbanisation is perhaps most often defined today as a process of transitionfrom a rural to an urban way of life (Wirth 1938). This is a definition intendedto emphasise a qualitative, cultural aspect of cities and overcome a physical

bias associating urbanisation with the material sizes or densities of cities. Itrecognises for example the non-intuitive fact that urbanisation can be ratherdiffuse, as we see in suburban and exurban development in Europe today(Stanilov 2007), or in the deltas of China in the 18th and 19th centuries(Pomeranz). It appears the association we have had between urbanisationand concentration may need to be modified and the causes of urbanisationbetter specified (Storper & Manville). But, concentration, in one form or other,does not drop out of the discussion. While cities are sometimes consideredthe jetsam of another age, vertical settlements in a horizontal world, artefactsof a time before distance died (Storper & Manville 1248), the association ofurbanisation with concentration is still heavily implicated in urban thinking

through notions of agglomeration in spatial economics (Fujita and Thisse,2002) and in new economic geography (see Storper, 1997). The associationof density with intensity, vitality and creativity plays a part in this incelebrations of the creative potentials of cities (Jacobs 1969), urban cultures(Zukin) and the compulsion of proximity (Boden & Molotch). Meanwhile today,in very different conditions of material and social density, and in all manner ofplaces, people are living urban lives, lives imbued with the qualities andcultures of what Louis Wirth called Urbanism.

We dont appear to have the instruments to find or explain how, at a largerange of different levels, scales and scopes, places become economically

active, or imbued with the culture of urbanism or with the creative potentialsand human capital Jacobs, Zukin and Boden and Molotch point to. It could bethat the first problem is one cultural urbanisation shares with an urbanisationconsidered in terms of densities or agglomerations or proximities. Both treatthe space of the city as a container, incorporating logics of what DavidHarvey calls absolute space (Harvey 1969). They both work by imaginingthat urban mass, or amenities, or qualitative attributes or human or socialcapital can be poured into the places they are located, or that these will beshifted around and located according to logics of preference or choice(Storper & Manville). Centrality cannot be simply attributed to patterns ofdensity, culture or preference. In fact centrality itself forms, at least to some

extent, patterns of density and behaviour in cities. We know from spacesyntax that the fabrics of inner cities display fine-grain differentiations ofcentrality, mirrored in social and economic differentiations and that thechoices city users and builders make refer and even defer to these patterns.

We see as well that the absolute spatialisation of the city misses qualities ofthe urban that are recognisable in everyday experience and everyday actionand activity. We experience an urban world in which the translocal is aspervasive and everyday and almost as accessible as the paving beneath ourfeet; we dont experience the city through the characteristics of absolutespace through area-defined, urban places with clear boundaries in which

the local is the only place present to us. In fact in many urban fabrics clearboundary definitions of districts or neighbourhoods or of the city itself are


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rather hard to find and we already understand that the way things relate toeach other is important for the way the city is known and used. Harveysrelational space will perhaps be less abstract, but also more difficult to defineanalytically. This relational space will be the main focus of this paper, whichfollows on from another (Read, 2013 forthcoming) which dealt with space

syntax directly as an analytical method in order to articulate in terms lessopaque than in space syntax the structures and spaces already there in urbanfabric the ones that are the reason space syntax works (Hillier 1999). Thepresent paper will start with methods of understanding centrality at muchlarger scales than space syntax clarify these in turn and to join them up withwhat I have previously called the space of space syntax (Read 2013forthcoming). This will leading to the beginnings of a model of the form ofurbanisation, and of the formation of central places at different ranges,scopes and levels. Part of the discussion will be about the nature andcharacter of these levels.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of a processthat is at the centre of contemporary social, economic and environmentaldevelopments. Better understanding implies better thinking and strategy whenit comes to planning and otherwise intervening in and guiding this process.The model proposed will suggest the beginnings of a simple typology of theurban patterns resulting from urbanisation, and will provoke new ways ofunderstanding (and new questions about) vitality, centrality and public spaceand how we can make these at a wide variety of levels and scales.

Putting cities firstI want to begin by introducing and gently critiquing contemporary ideas of citynetworks. These will become the basic frame on which I will build the rest ofmy account of urbanisation processes.

Our contemporary understanding of and discourse on cities and theirdevelopment is lead by ideas of global and world cities (Sassen 1991;Friedmann 1986, 1995; Beaverstock et al. 1999). A strong underlying themehere is the relative autonomy of cities and city-networks as architectures(Sassen 1991:xxx) of larger geo-political regions. It is an idea that is stronglyconnected today to notions of globalisation, the emergence of a different sort

of global economy and network society and the rise of new global regions andactors to join with nation states in influencing international and global affairs. Itleads also however back to an older and better historicised idea of a world-economy that always has an urban centre of gravity, a city, as the logisticheart of its activity (Braudel 1984:27).

Peter Taylor has followed Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, xxxx) in putting cities firstand focusing on how cities are implicated in the huge advancements humanshave made since such settlements first appeared about six or seven thousandyears ago. He combines notions of agglomeration and his own networktheory, seeing cities as themselves actors in the drama of human change,

agglomerating not just the skills and energy of people but also theexponentially increasing numbers of proximate relations between people in a


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communication theory of the growth of social and urban complexity (Taylor,2012). It is through this exponential increase in embedded potential relations,according to him, that cities can be represented as qualitatively different towhat came before and completely new social worlds of human experience(Taylor 2012:418). However Taylor also understands people and relations

agglomerating and concentrating in bounded territorial spaces.

He uses central place theory and networks to distinguish local and globallevels, associating central place theory with towns rather than cities anddrawing a distinction between town-ness and city-ness. Town-ness is arelatively simple flow of people to the town to access public goods or buyprivate goods. City-ness, on the other hand, deals with non-local flows ofpeople, commodities and information between cities, which has been termedcentral flow theory (Taylor 2012:419). The central place model is a supply-led evolutionary model of urban origination in surpluses of agriculturalproduction, while the central flow model is demand-led seeing cities

originating in trading networks and economic specialisation and theunprecedented population concentrations these stimulated. According toTaylor, several such nodes, in a strong and permanent trading network, couldusher in explosive economic expansion based on the creation of new work innew urban centres. He uses Ian Hodders excavation of atalhyk to arguefor an increasing internal complexity in these nodes, from an early state ofdomestic modes of production (Sahlins 2004) in which householdsparticipated relatively independently in emerging economies of new work,through increasing levels of urban and social organisation in terms of divisionsof labour and urban spaces of internal exchanges of skills and materials.

Proto-cities created spiralling demands and, Taylor suggests, the innovativepotentials to start fulfilling these. Taylor characterises these potentials as acombination of cluster/agglomeration processes within cities andnetwork/connectivity processes between cities. These processes createunprecedented communication potentials that make cosmopolitan cities thecrucibles of new ideas, innovations and inventions (Taylor, xxxx:xx). But, thenotion of communication seems to be pitched here at the local and relies onterritorial clustering, repeating territorial suppositions of a bounding space. Iwould argue that Taylor has tended to reduce cities themselves to ratherpassive containers of agglomeration. One result has been a neglect of thedetailed local conditions glossed here as clustering or separated from

material conditions as immaterial knowledge or creativity attributes.

It is already apparent in Taylors account that agglomeration is way too crudean idea and asks for methods better capable of dealing with at least thespatial aspects of this organised complexity. The reliance on a central placemodel for what is an urban organisation at the local level also seems crude.Im going to argue that rather than cities being simply local repositories ofknowledge, skills and social relations, they are themselves organised for aneffective, very often routine, exchange of different categories, domains andlevels of networked knowledge and practice. I would suggest that what citiesdo is organise people and societies rather than simply gather them in dense

little clusters.


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Modern worlds, world-cities

The state of cities today is consequent on a centuries-old sequence, outlinedby Braudel, of shifting cores of the capitalist world-economy. Peter Taylor hascharacterised this sequence in terms of three prime modernities that haverepresented transitions of world hegemony from a 17th-18th centurymercantile Dutch modernity to an 18th-19th Century industrial Britishmodernity and a 20th century consumerist modernity (Taylor, 1999). With thiswe move beyond the conflation of the idea of modernity with industrial society,to multiple and sequences of modernities and world-economies (andpresumably multiple societies). Each of these modernities represents amassive historical shift of forces (Braudel 1984:32) with concomitant shifts inthe centre of the world-economy from Amsterdam to London to New York.These world-economies are progressively more global, have a unified

division and integration of labour and accumulation processes stretchedbetween its always more advanced, historically enlarging, and geographicallyshifting core and its always less advanced, disproportionately enlarging, andgeographically shifting periphery. Hopkins (1982:11).

Articulating this is a succession of world-city networks, where, in the network,world and city stand in mutually constitutive relations with one another.While discussions about systems tend to deemphasise the multiplicity andcontingency of these processes, Eric Slater reminds us the possibility of bi- ormulti-polarity of world-city networks was already established with world-citynetworks that preceded Taylors three prime modernities being divided

between centres in Antwerp and Genoa. Also already established is themultivalency of these processes where even earlier, Venetian hegemony wasa result of commercial and naval power, while Genoas was based on finance,and Antwerp was a market for merchants from different networks (Slater2004:593). Only with the rise of Amsterdam did capitalism become areasonably coherent series of world-economies, each with a new urban centreconcentrating flows of economic life and progressing to (near) hegemonybefore being overturned by the next (Slater 2004:593). Slater goes on toargue against a strict global systematicity of Sassens model of a trinity ofpowerful global cities formed in response to a global hegemony, toreemphasise history and variations in structure in the past and present of the

global city (Slater 2004:605).

Peter Hall (1966) has also emphasised the multivalency of world-cities withdifferent attributes of politics, trade, communications, finance, culture,technology and higher education placing different world-cities of London,Paris, Randstad-Holland, Rhine-Ruhr, Moscow, New York and Tokyo at thetop of world-city hierarchies (Hall, 1966). Nevertheless with the economic turn(Hymer, S. (1972) there has been a tendency towards more economicsystematisations (for example, Fujita et al, 1999).

Although there is some discussion, especially from critics (for exampleRobinson, 2002) about what is included and not included in the system, inworld- and global city networks it is the system that dominates the discourse


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rather than the patterns of being in or out of it that I will highlight later. I wantto take forward this emphasis on contingency, multivalency and multiplicitybecause I want to argue that networks integrating processes of society,economy and culture have existed at all levels of urban life and progressedhistorically to (near) hegemony in their turn. But, most important is that

attention to the systematicity and structure of networks has kept attentionaway from the structural effects of the relations between different networks.This is true in the world-city discourse where peripheralisation for example isan effect of the network and what is lost is the peripheralisation that is not anetwork effect so much as a effect simply of being out of the network, andperhaps in another. Lost also is the way interrelationships between differentnetworks may be a systematic means to bring different logics togethernecessary for a complex productive systems that can never be reduced toone system or one network. What I will suggest later is that hierarchy,normally understood as a product of a centre to periphery gradient withinnetworks, could be a seen as a relation between networks and levels.

While there is no argument that urban networks are systems, and that theseinternalise (and systematise) systemic logics, what I will be emphasising isthat these systems are historical they and their logics are products ofconstruction, adjustment, politicking and negotiation over time. We could thinkof these systematisations as being built into a fragmented world in order toestablish coherence across particular regional ranges and scopes of humanactivity. I will talk later about how these may interconnect to effectuate thecomplex interpenetration of different systemic logics. Systematisation hereimplies partiality because it is not the whole of human affairs that issystematised in any one network but only that part related to the business and

scope of the network itself. Jonathan Israel has argued that while Amsterdamwas building its hegemonic world-economy it was simultaneously drawing onthe dynamism of a slightly earlier construction of a coherent system ofwaterways covering most of the cities in Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, atsomething approaching what was to become the national scale. This networkinterlinked different urban economies and facilitated the rapid circulation ofgoods and passengers between cities (Israel, 2002:xxx).

This complicates the world-city argument in an interesting way. Amsterdamwas no longer acting simply as a city at the centre of its world-city network,but as a node at the intersection of two networks, one of them a network of

Dutch cities more coordinated and coherent than there was to be foundanywhere else in Europe (Israel 2002:16). Israel argues for the creativity ofthis intersection between a proto-national state and a world-city network asacross this intersection flowed not just money and people, but knowledge,invention and other assets developed in cities like Leyden and Haarlem forexample. The United Provinces lacked many of the attributes of a modernstate, but, according to Braudel it certainly cannot be said that the Dutchgovernment was non-existent (Braudel 1984;193-5;205). There wereconsiderable organisational structures set up in these early modern networksof economy and government and where Peter Taylor talks of the creativity ofrelations contained within urban walls what these sorts of structuresemphasise are the crossing ofdifferenteconomies and cross-valency, cross-scalar relations at the point of intersection.


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But in order to articulate this idea of network organisation and the articulationof different valencies it will also be necessary to distinguish the simplicity ofdifferent generic networks themselves built and converging historically to astate of being (near) generic levels and the complexity of the differencescontained in different networks. The simplicity I am referring to concerns the

establishment here, with different networks, of levels built for intelligibility asmuch as for anything else. These levels have a metageographic (Lewis &Wigen, xxxx) character, establishing geographic and geo-political entities likeworld and nation in the example above. We can start to treat theintersection of world network and nation network in Amsterdam as an issueof the simplicity of the intersection of two intelligible levels of humangeography leading to opportunities and a demand for complex work anddivisions of labour in the emerging nation as well as in the city. Thisconstruction of levels is itself historical and a construction and a system interms I will develop further in the next section. Amsterdams urbanisation anddevelopment could be seen as a creative productof this intersection.

Spatial technologies

The sort of networks Taylor talks of have long been associated withtechnology. Paul Edwards points out that technology is pervasive in modernlives. He points out at the same time that it becomes quickly naturalised andhow today television, indoor plumbing, and telephony are hardly mentioned inrelation to modernity, while ceramics, screws, basketry, and paper, no longereven count as technology (Edwards, xxxx:185). Edwards defines

infrastructures as the basic facilities, services, and installations needed forthe functioning of a community or society but also makes the point thatinfrastructure is best defined negatively, as those systems without whichcontemporary societies cannot function (Edwards, xxxx:187). The system orinfrastructure I am developing here is exactly one of those pervasive,naturalised, relatively low-tech systems without which urban societiesthroughout history could not have functioned.

Infrastructure is not just hardware, technologies and infrastructures aresociotechnicalin nature and deliver social organisation. This organisationconsists of socially communicated background knowledge, general

acceptance and reliance, and near-ubiquitous accessibility (Edwards,xxxx:xxx). Infrastructures dont just give us systemic, societywide control overthe variability inherent in the natural environment (Edwards, xxxx:xxx) theyalso organise things into a distinct modern world, delivering capacities thathave themselves become naturalised and standards of comfort unknownoutside such a world. According to Star and Ruhleder (1996) infrastructurehas five properties: it is embedded in other structures; it is transparent; it hasreach or scope; it is learned as part of membership of a community ofpractice, and; it shapes and is shaped by the conventions of that community.Infrastructures are material culture, learned as part of membership incommunities, while this knowledge is by extension a prerequisite to

membership. Infrastructural knowledge is a condition of contextuality in which


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understanding any part requires a grasp of the whole that comes only throughexperience (Edwards).

Infrastructural knowledge is an internally related self-contextualising whole, aWittgensteinian form of life (Wittgenstein 1958), in which the different

elements and practices in the network make sense by virtue of their mutualinterrelationships in a sort of cultural or life paradigm. Here we understandthe notion of paradigm in the relational sense Thomas Kuhn uses it; as a setof practices (and associated material elements) that bind a community ofpractice (Kuhn). In this sense infrastructures integrate the practices andelements of a community or society and become environmentto them. Tolive within the multiple, interlocking infrastructures of modern societies is toknow ones place in gigantic systems that both enable and constrain us ().Building infrastructures has been constitutive of the modern condition, inalmost every conceivable sense. At the same time, ideologies and discoursesof modernism have helped define the purposes, goals, and characteristics of

those infrastructures. In other words, the co-construction of technology andmodernity can be seen with exceptional clarity in the case of infrastructure ().

The idea of sociotechnical infrastructures can start to explain the relationbetween the prime modernities of Taylor and the systems they depend on.We can account for example for the simultaneous invention and mutualcoordination of different parts of systems using Thomas Hughes concept ofthe reverse salient (Hughes 1987). System or infrastructure builders likeThomas Edison require multiple technical components as well as social,cultural and economic factors to work together for a complex system to work.All these components and factors will be unlikely to be developed at the same

rate and those that drag behind form a reverse salient in the advance of thefront of the whole system. These problems hold up the progress of systembuilding so that wherever they occur they focus attention and commandextraordinary theoretical, practical (engineering), and economic interest(Edwards). It is with the reverse salients in system building that much of theresearch we do concerned. Solutions to problems may get progress in systembuilding going again, or they may redirect development along alternative lines,as happened for example with the introduction of alternative current toovercome the problems direct current electrical grids were experiencing(Hughes 1983).

This indicates as well that infrastructures are not simply technology expandedand it is not simply railway engines or motor cars that change the course ofmodern life. Infrastructures are tightly organised integrations of multiple social,cultural, economic and technical factors and components. These integrationshave real presences in the world, with distributions, scopes, ranges,transparency or intelligibility, public access points, protected technical zonesand designed and undesigned or colateral effects. We could understand themas sociotechnical spaces (Read, 2012) which operate at every level of urbansocieties including, but not limited to the world-economy. World or globalinfrastructures are not the only ones operative in any prime modernity, thereare also infrastructures at national levels, many at urban levels, supporting

basic daily patterns and relations of our cities, and many more at levels above


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and below this. In fact, there are a multiplicity of infrastructures supportingmodern economies, cultures and societies.

But these infrastructures also dont simply exist in a transparent, frictionlesspreexisting or absolute space. They are themselves spatial, existing in,

supporting, and supported and even shaped by, a multiplicity of geographicallevels that could also be understood as relating to different ways of life andcommunities of practice. These levels give ranges and scopes to economies,cultures and societies, from those of world-economies, cultures and societies,to others at regional, national, urban and other levels. These levels alsointerrelate in order that the whole complexity of production, consumption andother processes that animate modern life become operational. It is thismultiplicity of levels and their intersections, itself an infrastructure, or set ofinfrastructures, that I will begin to outline here and, with space syntax, in thenext section.

Rather than particular technologies like light bulbs, telephones, railwayengines or motor cars transforming lives, multiple technologies are enrolled increating spaces which connect with and enable social lives. These spacesmust and do join up. Not only do technical and social aspects join up in thesystem itself, systems join up with already existing systems in our real andpractical worlds. Light bulbs and telephones connect with electric reticulationand telephone lines, meter reading and billing systems, but they also link withthe cities and neighbourhoods of houses which preceded them and into whichthey were initially installed. Railway engines and motor cars connect withrailway tracks, stations and modern highways, but they connect also with thenetworks of cities that preceded them. These spaces dont just equip us to do

things, they equip us in a world already legible and distributed in networks.Their spaces merge with spaces already existing. In many cases, certainlywhen it comes to railways and highway systems, their spaces reinforce theselegible spaces and make them even more legible. They incorporate andembed the places and the logics of the relations of places to enable us to seethe world better at different levels or scales and to act in it at these levels andscales.

The kinds of infrastructures that embed places also embed, as networksorganised in levels, the logics of places relations with each other. Throughthem we understand our territories and our places in them and through them

other sociotechnical networks are woven. A relatively low-tech, socio-tech,network of known and named places we could think of as metageographicalhas preceded the contemporary mobility and information revolutions and it isthrough this other network logic that new network logics of modern travel andcommunication and social and business organisation is still mediated. Thisother network logic supported and shaped other revolutions before this one.An industrial revolution reshaped cities previously by adding the Europeanurban neighbourhood to this basic network logic and I will describe this in thenext section.

What we learn from space syntax


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I have argued before that space syntax reveals a structure embedded in theurban fabric, that this structure is historical and a product of a specific phaseof the reconstruction of the Western European city in the 19th and early 20thcenturies. Space syntax has been involved, especially in its earlier andformative phases, with fabrics constructed in an industrial expansion of cities

in Europe and I have argued that while there may be parallels with fabricsbuilt in different regions, times and conditions, we should see them all ashistorical constructions and that typologies and generalities in urban fabricsshould be thought of in the first instance as an empirical rather than atheoretical matter (Read 2013 forthcoming). I argued that what thisurbanisation consisted of was a structuration of neighbourhoods and centresaround grids of new transportation networks consisting of trams, metros andso on. Although the motor car was a feature of urban life before the middle ofthe twentieth century, it was not until after the second world war that itbecame a mode of everyday mass transportation, and the specifictransportation networks associated with this mass transportation mode began

to be systematically built (Schipper 2008; Berman 1982).

I argued that this pre-war mode of urbanisation was structured differently tocar-based urbanisation and that this distinction corresponds with that betweenTaylors second (industrial) and third (consumer) modes of modernity.Whereas the neighbourhoods and centres of industrial urbanisation weredistributed on, and oriented towards, mainly public transportation networkswithin the industrial city, those built after the war were distributed on andoriented towards inter-city commuter highways and railways. The twourbanisation modes produced on the one hand the dense inner-city fabriccharacteristic of the industrial city and on the other the diffuse inter-city

urbanisation of the post-industrial city (Read 2013 forthcoming).

I argued that the structure of industrial city fabric could be characterised as aneffect of a grid characteristic of industrial city fabrics. This supergrid can beidentified as the network of main streets (as opposed the neighbourhood orback streets) overlaying the more general street and block grid of Europeanurban fabric. In space syntax axial maps the supergrid stands out as a joined-up network of generally longer axial lines at a grid scale several times largerthan that of the regular grid. I have defined the supergrid before, on the basisof empirical measurements of movement rate distributions in Dutch cities, asthat grid of very significantly higher traffic that overlays the basic street and

block grid of urban fabric. The significance of this grid for space syntax isconsiderable because while space syntax gets a lot of its legitimacy from thefact that its measures correlate with movement rates in urban streets, if thereis a pattern of streets strategically constructed for very significantly higherlevels of traffic that are also likely, because of the way the fabric is structured,to have very significantly higher space syntax measures, then the fact there isa correlation between high syntax values and high traffic rates locally shouldnot be a surprise. I argued we should be looking at the supergrid as astructuring entity in its own right and a mode of social and technicalorganisation rather than finding it more indirectly through the graph theoreticalmanipulation of a mass of axial lines.


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The supergrid connects urban main-streets which also centreneighbourhoods while the regular street and block grid connects buildingsand other facilities within neighbourhoods. The supergrid connectsneighbourhoods as parts into a whole of the city, while the street and blockgrid connects parts at the level of houses or shops into a whole of the

neighbourhood. This is a description of a nested hierarchical structure, but thediagram in which this hierarchy is constructed is not that of the familiarbounded areas and circles within circles (figure 1) but rather that of grids laidover grids (figure 2).

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

In order to understand what structure means here we need to clarify certainurban relations and relational terms like inside and outside. Whereas insideand outside are understood in figure 1 in a background space divided intoinsides and outsides by boundaries, being in or out of a network is anotherway of understanding these terms. In the network we have a construction inwhich system logic and context are internalised. A structure of insidenessmay be understood in relation to the logic or sense internalised as context inthe network and things outside the network will not join in this sense-makinglogic, though they may make sense in entirely different networks. Inmultiplying these networks and relating them to each other we have a

construction in which different contexts and systemic logics ofneighbourhood and city may be interrelated at their points of contact orintersection. The experience of being in the city is delivered by the supergridwhile the experience of being in the neighbourhood is delivered by the regulargrid. Being in the city or in the neighbourhood become conditions defined ingrids and without boundaries. The main street itself is the place where one isin the city and in the neighbourhood simultaneously and where the creativeconsequences of this intersection are encountered. Again, the stimulus ofdifference captured in this intersection could be seen as creatively producingurbanisation and development.

The diagram of this is in principle identical to the case I described earlierwhere the world-city network met the nation-city network in early modernAmsterdam. Amsterdam became a place where what happens in the world-city network is brought into relation and reconciled with what happens in thenation-city network with, according to Israel and in the spirit of Jane Jacobs,creative urbanising consequences.

The supergrid has one structural role in the industrial city, while the street andblock grid has another. These respective roles are to define and enact thespace of the city on the one hand and the space of the neighbourhood onthe other. Structure is a form of knowledge and knowledge being enacted

here is that of what city and neighbourhood are how they relate to one


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another formally, functionally and intelligibly. This is so integral one could saythe knowledge is in the physical fabric itself (Read 2013 forthcoming).

The senses of world and city implied in Peter Taylors world-city networkconcept is exactly analogous to the senses of city and neighbourhood I

have developed here in city-neighbourhood and neighbourhood-housenetworks respectively. The world is a condition of being in a network andbetween cities, while the city is a condition of being in a network betweenneighbourhoods, and the neighbourhood is a condition of being in a networkbetween houses.

In fact the notion of grid here clarifies an aspect of networks that Jacobsemphasised more than Taylor; that rather than cities coming first, it wasactually networks that were first. Cities grew oriented to networks as theelements like neighbourhoods and houses are oriented to the grids in thesense-making, contextualising structures of supergrid and regular grid. The

condition of node can disappear as we interpret concentrations of urbanmass, people and the urbanisation process itself as produced in the creativepotentials in the intersections of grids. Of course many sociotechnicalnetworks like that of air travel have nodes built into them but airports are alsoequipped with shuttle busses, express rail travel and other technical means tofacilitate the intersection with regional and city networks. Looked at from thisperspective, the city is an effect of the world network, while theneighbourhood is an effect of the city network and houses are effects ofneighbourhood networks.

All these products are emergent, all will have moments of origination where

they are less defined and defining and may even be surprising to the peopleexperiencing them, and all of them will tend to become naturalised and realwith time so that today the fact we cannot draw a boundary around thefunctional radius of a city or neighbourhood does not make us doubt therealities of these things.

The industrial period of the Western European city was also the time of theemergence of systematised public transportation and the fact publictransportation uses the supergrid alerts us to the relatively higher level ofscale and publicness of this network. This difference is reflected not just inthe relatively higher rates and ranges of movement but also in a more public

role of the grid. The exemplary case is of course Haussmanns Paris, wherethe strategy of driving a joined up network of boulevards through the urbanfabric to open it to city-wide traffic was also used to connect emblematicpublic buildings and railway stations. This city-level network defined a newpublic face of the city and stood in contrast to the quiet streets joined directlywith it defining a more intimate neighbourly realm.

In Amsterdam the supergrid establishes the city level, connecting thismetageographical city with neighbourhoods as well as city-level buildingsand functions. The street and block grid establishes the neighbourhood level,connecting neighbourhood-level buildings and functions, like houses,community facilities, local shops and so on. These metageographical levelsare factors of economy, society and governance. They enable the economic


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and social levels that become important in the production machine that is theindustrial city. At the same time they underpin distinct municipal andneighbourhood community and governance regimes characteristic of theindustrial city. We can add these levels to the world network and the nationnetwork I mentioned earlier. Our historical construction of levels now consists

of world-city network, nation-city network, city-neighbourhood network andneighbourhood-house network. I argued that these levels are not abstract ormetaphoric but perfectly real in the sense they realise the metageographicentities they enact as places. This reality is emphasised by the empirical factof the infrastructural networks involved which are readily distinguishable andmappable.

Some implications for the discussion of level and scale are now clearer.Scale is often thought of as size, but in urban thinking it has also been used todistinguish what we could call levels of analysis. However, what these levelsare is often not very clearly understood or articulated. In fact, the ontological

status of scales has been contested with many warning against theirreification (Agnew 1993) and some believing they dont exist as anything realat all (Marsden et al). What I have described however is clearly somethingmore than level of analysis, abstraction or metaphor. David Prytherchcontributes a reality check, pointing to Wal-Marts geography of big things[given in] the outsized spatiality of the big box and the global commoditychains in which it is embedded (Prytherch 2002:xxx). From an infrastructuralperspective Wal-Marts global operations depend on a tightly coordinatedsociotechnical organisation, in which goods, people and machines aredistributed and scheduled. The space-time of this organisation is thisdistribution and scheduling, which is maintained by managerial, administrative

and technical operatives who enact complex sequences and interconnectionsand guarantee the material and informational transactions that flow across it.Like any strategic construction, this one is maintained, and any breakdown ofthis space-time is met by a remedial response.

But, I would argue, the scale in Wal-Marts geography of big things issomething this sociotechnical system inherits from another more genericnetwork metageography into which Wal-Marts global operations are, andmust be, fitted. It is this more generic geography that world-city networks andsupergrids have pointed us to. Prytherch still suggests however thathierarchies of scale may inhere more in a territorialized imaginary in political

geography than scale itself (Prytherch) suggesting to me that at least a partof the scale problem concerns a difficulty we have understanding how oursociotechnically constructed worlds are at the same time objective andepistemological both real and constructions that incorporate knowledgeabout that world.

1

The construction I have described is clearly not a nested hierarchy ofbounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national andglobal (Delaney & Leitner 1997:93). I showed how our conventionalunderstanding of the spatialisation of cities and neighbourhoods by a diagram

1 I have tackled the ontology of constructed realities from a perspective of thehermeneutical philosophy of science in Read 2012 and Read 2013.


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of nested areas needs to be supplemented by another diagram of overlaidgrids. Space is no longer defined in bounded entities at all but in actualtransportation infrastructures representing and enacting grids ofmetageographic levels and places. Levels and scales inhere in the gridsthemselves, through the places enacted and known in them. Through these

grids we can understand nested hierarchies of houses neighbourhoods, cities,regions, nations, and the world as given in these.

A diagram of urbanisation

As knowledge attaches to the grids, so do processes of urbanisation, asaccretions of big things, medium-sized things and small things oriented to thegrids in which these things make sense and are contextualised. Theseaccretions are products of the creative potentials of the intersections ofdifferent realms of sense and context. The shops spring up at the intersectionof a neighbourhood realm and one of the city; the city springs up at theintersection of the world and the nation although also at the intersection ofthe world and the city of neighbourhoods, or today at the intersection of theworld and the city of commuter suburbs. The starting question of this paperwas how we could elaborate the process of urbanisation so that we couldbetter understand this process at scales and levels below that of cities, and Ibegan with Peter Taylors world-city network, noting that he invokes JaneJacobs to give priority to cities. In fact Jacobs gives priority to the networksand sees cities as products of those networks. The creativity she and herfollowers talk of starts with a process of urbanisation with the creation of the

city itself.I have outlined a sketch of the form of the urban as a superposition of anumber of metageographical levels. In order to do this I have taken elementsof Peter Taylors world-city network and replaced his association of the localwith central place theory with what I have learned and deduced about urbannetworks and central place formation from space syntax and its working onindustrial city fabric. This enables us to track the formation of central places or the potentials for these as intensive emergent effects at each of themetageographical levels. These include levels below that of the city or regionso that we can track the emergence of centrality into the finer grained fabric of

the city and city region. This finer grain may also feed back into centresformed at higher levels and scales as networks at lower levels and localpotentials promote the formation of centres at higher levels.

The basic diagram I have outlined suggests we should approach urbanisationand central place formation as one of a hierarchy of complex sociotechnicalsystems organised into simple metageographical levels. The levels distinguishnot just the simple and intelligible scales and identities of everyday humangeographies but also the complex scale-dependent interests and logicsembedded in the sociotechnical systems woven into and distributed with them.The intersections of the layers allows different domains and scales of ourmultivalent economic, cultural, social and human lives to be recombined incentral places where differences and valencies meet, complex work is done


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and societies and economies are organised. We could think of this layering asan artefact; an historically constructed system and a sociotechnics of places that has made the world systematically available to us while it has alsodefined the growth points at the different levels it incorporates.

We can propose a provisional typology of forms of urbanisation and types ofcentral places based on this layering of levels: the neighbourhood is formedaround a grid that connects neighbourhood to house; the industrial or innercity is formed around a grid that connects city to neighbourhood; the post-industrial or metropolitan city is formed around a grid that connectsmetropolitan region to city. We could go on till we define the world as formedaround a grid that connects world to city while it also connects world toglobal region, nation and metropolitan region. These urbanisations bloomaround grids and in different levels and at different scales simultaneously,producing different effects both within each level and between levels. Thecentral places formed in each level (or between levels each have different

characters and different social and economic characteristics. There is a greatdeal that is complex about what I have just written and needs to be exploredfurther but the framework and the diagram are as clear as the world is most ofthe time to us in our patterns of everyday life.

The clear distinction of different types of central place between that at thelevel of the neighbourhood main street in the industrial city fabric and that atthe level of the metropolitan highway for example begins to open certainproblems of public space and its character to fresh analysis. Problems offragmentation may become easier to theorise when we begin to distinguishwhat layer is fragmented and in relation to what. Issues of energy use and

efficiency can be related to industrial city modes of urbanisation versusconsumer or post-industrial modes of urbanisation and this may lead to ideasabout future strategies for development. The important contribution here is theproposal of a different relationalspace to guide our thinking about urbandevelopment or urbanisation.


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Intensive Urbanisation: Levels, Networks and Central Places