Land Use From Field to City to Region: One Framework for the World's Places

The idea

The exam's rural and urban land-use item and its regional-geography item are one question asked at three scales, and the anchors answer it in sequence. At the field: agriculture began independently in several hearths, and its first division is purpose, subsistence for the family or commerce for sale, with method beneath it, shifting fields, intensive plots, moving herds, export plantations, extensive ranches, integrated agribusiness. The Green Revolution moved high-yield seeds and fertilizer from core to periphery and, as the witness records, supported the population growth of Asia; the biorevolution follows it, and food security, all people at all times, is the measure both are judged by. At the factory: industry located by least cost, Weber's transportation above all, bulk reduced at the source and cargo broken at the port, then organized by Fordism's assembly line and Taylor's stopwatch, then split by outsourcing and offshoring into a supply chain that containers and JIT delivery hold together, until competition's pressure to cut costs deindustrialized the places that began it. At the settlement: rural space, still forty-five and a half percent of humanity by the UN's dated count, gave way to cities that first rose in five hearths; the city's limits are argued three ways; its interior is modeled as rings, wedges or several centers; its place in a national system is read by rank-size or primacy; and its edges sprawl, suburbanize, and gentrify back. Beneath all three lie resources, renewable or not, proven or potential, conserved or preserved. At the region: Finlayson's nine realms are each a case of the same framework, a core and a hinterland, a history of settlement, a pattern of cities, a set of resources and a place in the global inequality that regional geography, he says, is in many ways the study of. Field, factory, city, region: the same questions, where and why, asked at each scale.