Growth and development in a regional urban system: the country towns of eastern Yorkshire, 1700–1850

Abstract

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many as one-half of the urban inhabitants of England and Wales lived in small towns. In 1801 62 per cent of all towns with populations of 2,500 or more contained fewer than 5,000 inhabitants and in 1901 30 per cent of all towns still contained less than 10,000 persons. Yet despite the strength of small towns within the national urban system these communities are far from proportionately represented in the large body of academic literature directed towards analysing towns and urban growth. Our knowledge and understanding of the forces of change acting upon towns at the lower end of the urban size hierarchy in this critical transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains relatively undeveloped, and this is especially true for rural areas untouched by the main wave of industrialization.

The Evolution of Complexity in the Valley of Oaxaca

“…Using an arbitrary lower population limit of 1000 ignores smaller places whose urban functions may be important (13,55).Towns as small as 100-200 inhabitants probably had functions in the Valley's urban network. Defining size classes by "natural breaks" in size distributions is more sensitive to the smaller centers and to the nature of urbanization in particular regions.…”