Urban Geography in the United States: My Experience of the Formative Years

During the period up to and through World War 11, doctoral dissertations in the University of Chicago were written in the form of monographs on individual cities. Among the major themes of this period were situation of a city with respect to a productive hinterland; historical geography of original settlement and sequential development; transportational, industrial, trade, and residential activities in individual cities; land utilization patterns within a city; and tributary areas. These themes illustrate the context of the field at the time members of my generation were students. Among the contributions we in our turn made were empirical quantitative studies classifying cities, theoretical typologies of city distributions and internal patterns, field studies of individual cities, and patterns of urban distribution and growth for the United States or other countries.