Cambridge Geographical Studies – serie

This book is about the prevalent characteristics and distribution of the major agricultural systems of the world - shifting cultivation, wet rice cultivation, pastoral nomadism, Mediterranean agriculture, mixed farming, dairying, plantations, ranching and large-scale grain production. In Part One some major periods and processes that have affected agriculture are discussed. Chapter 2 deals with the origins and early diffusion of agriculture and its significance. Chapter 3 deals with the subsequent diffusion of crops and livestock, particularly since the discovery of the New World, and Chapter 4 with the effect upon agriculture of industrialisation and urbanisation since 1850. In Part Two of the book some description of each type of agriculture is given. It is the author's belief that there can be no adequate account of the prevailing character of world agriculture without recourse to the evolution of agricultural systems. Thus each chapter in Part Two is an essay on the historical development of each of the major systems.

The concept of the city as a mosaic of social worlds has achieved wide currency: the residential differentiation of the urban population provides the matrix for much human activity. In this detailed study, the author demonstrates that much of the manifold variation in the social characteristics of populations living in different parts of the city may be summarized in terms of a small number of factors relating to social rank, style of life preferences and ethnicity. Residential and social differentiation are seen as intimately connected. At the individual level, it is suggested that questions relating to social rank, style of life, and ethnicity provide the main framework for the choice of residential location. At the societal level, it is suggested that the variations in the inter-relationship of the basic differentiating factors are a function of modernization. Empirical material is drawn from an number of Australian cities.

This book, originally published in 1969, will hold interest for the urban geographer. It outlines the techniques and methodology which at the time were increasingly being used by geographers working in urban studies. In doing this Dr Robson shows how disciplines which were once separate were becoming more closely interrelated when dealing with urban studies. For example, the ecologist's interest in spatial association and areal patterns is of obvious value to the urban geographer and, in discussing this, Dr Robson explores both the relevance of older ecological models and tests the validity of what were newer approaches. The particular interest of this book lies in its analysis of the human ecology of Sunderland which at the time the book was written had a high proportion of people employed in traditional heavy manufacturing and ship-building industries. The results of this analysis are used as a basis for a study of working-class attitudes towards education in the town.

This is a book about the population of London during the early modern period and a detailed book about the population of a European metropolitan city at that time. Much is now known about the historical demography of rural England, but very little is understood about the larger towns and cities. Roger Finlay applies new techniques in historical demography, principally family reconstitution and aggregative analysis of parish registers, to study the growth of population in London. He shows that parish registers are as reliable for the analysis of population trends in London as in rural England. The death rate was much higher in London than in the countryside, and this difference was not offset by a markedly higher birth rate, so the population would have declined but for migration. There were striking variations in both fertility and mortality between contrasting social areas of London.

This book approaches the study of patterns by emphasising the processes responsible for them; it emphasises the logical format of process-to-pattern rather than the more wasteful pattern-to-process approach. The concern is primarily with two-dimensional surfaces, which is the way most maps are used for analysis. The material is organised into sections on process models responsible for point patterns, for line patterns and then for area patterns. It represents a synthesis of the work done on patterns in a number of fields and a large literature is reviewed in the process of the synthesis. In many respects this book represents a translation of complex mathematical materials into a readable and relatively simple verbal approach to the subject and thus brings the more sophisticated aspects to a larger number of students than has been done before. The reader need only have an elementary background in statistics. The basic probability theory required by the text is given in an appendix.

The economic changes of the industrial revolution came to different parts of England at different times. By examining the geography of these changes, this book shows how the pattern of production in an important coalfield changed as it became part of the regional economic system developing around the port of Liverpool. In the first part of the book the author develops a model for studying the geography of economic change by combining the economic location theory of August Losch with concepts from systems theory. He concludes that normative theories possess great value in allowing an ordered description of the process of growth, if not an explanation of it. The theoretical model allows the author to analyse the complex process of change in the coalfield. The combination of theoretical enquiry and detailed archival work provides a thorough account of the transformation of an important industry. In doing so, the book casts considerable light on the process of regional economic development in the English industrial revolution.

The age of Francis Bacon marked the beginning of a long period when empirical science was seen as the key to progress in extending man's control over nature. Recently, however, a breakdown of confidence in the outcome of worldwide industrialism and a growing concern over threats to the earth's ecosystems have brought mounting criticism of specialized, exploitative science. Demands for conservation and social responsibility are leading to a reappraisal of the whole philosophy of science that has been dominant for three centuries, and many observers see this as a new scientific revolution, comparable in significance with that of the seventeenth century.

This book attempts to advance locational explanation in industrial geography by more fully exploring relationships between organizations and the environments within which they operate. The volume is in two parts, the first developing a theoretical framework and the second testing this framework with data for firms in the electronics industry in the UK. To produce the theoretical framework, ideas derived from geographers' studies of linkages and information flows are reviewed and amalgamated with ideas embodied in organization theorists' contingency models of organisational structure. These two sets of studies are complementary. The geographical studies are empirically strong but conceptually weak, and are cast in an explicitly spatial framework. The structural contingency models, however, are empirically weak, conceptually strong and almost entirely aspatial. The amalgamation of these two sets of ideas yields an a priori model of organization environment interactions, which is tested in the second half of the volume.

In 1978, when this book was first published, the provision of water services was a fundamental environmental issue. In England and Wales, organizations were created to protect and enhance the nation's water resources. This book considers the problems involved in achieving those objectives and attempts to assess the potential of the organizational arrangements to assist. Each type of water management problem is presented in the context of an actual example. The conflicts inherent in the need for surface reservoirs are discussed using the Lake District as an example. The Severn Trent river system is used as the basis for an examination of flood damage reduction. The Mersey and Trent river systems are used similarly when effluent disposal and river quality are discussed. Amongst other questions covered are spray irrigation and the control of groundwater resources. A final chapter deals with national aspects of water management including the proposal in 1973 for a 'national water grid'. This is a book for those seriously concerned with water management both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

This book is an investigation of the manner in which the provision and operation of the housing market in Britain has influenced the spatial evolution of urban areas. In particular, the pattern of residential mobility and intra-urban migration is used to demonstrate the way in which changes in the housing market have produced changes in the social geography of the city. One English city, Leicester, is used as a case-study to show how such processes have operated since the Industrial Revolution.

Hillslopes occupy most the landscape. Studies of process mechanisms and rates have become sufficiently numerous to allow a systematic study of slopes. Only by making a synthesis of quantitative process studies and relating them to the development of slope forms can the shape of the landscape be understood and the separate effects of lithology and climate assessed. In the introductory part of this book, the choice of appropriate system and scale is discussed, and models for uplift and erosion evaluated. Attention is thus focused on the dynamic equilibrium of the slope profile and its erosional development over time. Part I then examines the forces encouraging hillslope movement and the resistances opposing movement. Part 2 considers processes of rock instability, soil instability, wash, solution and soil creep. Each is discussed in terms of its mechanism and rate of operation, and the slope provides it produces. Part 3 outlines how this systematic approach may be applied to areas of different climate and the extent to which there is an assemblage of processes characteristic of each area. In part 4, the process evidence and models are combined into theoretical sequences of slope profile development, and the effect of contour curvature in modifying these profiles on spurts and in hollows is examined.

Central grants to local governments are a major aspect of public policy in all western economies. This book has two main aims: first, it seeks to relate central grants to the overall structure of taxes and expenditures of the economy as a whole, and second, it draws together for the first time a major set of empirical evidence on one major grant programme standing at £12,000 million in 1982, the Rate Support Grant in England and Wales. The thesis of the book is developed in three parts. Part one examines the objectives of central grant programmes: namely, need, resource and cost equalisation. Part two of the book develops a detailed empirical analysis of the Rate Support Grant and highlights those areas which have been relatively advantaged and disadvantaged in grant allocation. In part three the discussion is extended to an examination of the full interrelation of central grants with local taxes and expenditures. This leads to the main conclusions of the book, which are developed as a set of suggested reforms to local revenues in Britain.

Originally published in 1973, this book reports experiments in the modelling of freight flows in Great Britain, on the basis of 78 origin-destination zones covering the entire country. Its central purpose is to establish whether gravity model or linear programming approaches provide the most appropriate way of describing the existing spatial distribution of freight volumes and hence of predicting future flows, given possible allocations of population. Linear programming appears to be the msot useful way to approach freight modelling on this scale. The model outputs allow the authors to probe the problem of regional comparative advantage in terms of the volume of transport inputs. Although there is some association with the accessibility of regions, it is not true that the peripheral areas are at a serious disadvantage. Furthermore, evidence on the structure of transport costs indicates that movement costs are a surprisingly low proportion of total transport costs - thus further reducing the effects of location. The study concludes with a review of the lines along which work might proceed.

Elements of Spatial Structure is a contribution to the literature on spatial series. Written by a group with varied backgrounds in engineering, geography and statistics, who collaborated at Bristol University in the early 1970s, the book analyses certain basic properties of spatial structure. It shows how spatial elements form an essential part of the real-world problems of population distribution, of urban and regional economies, and of diffusion processes. The book is divided into three parts. Part one is concerned with a static cross-sectional approach to spatial structure and explores some aspects of the central geographical problems of region-building and trend-surface mapping. Part two moves to a dynamic framework and extends time-series analysis in a regional framework. It includes two chapters on the application of the models presented to diffusion and unemployment data in south-west England. Part three links the first two parts together through a consideration of spatial autocorrelation and spatial forecasting. Again, formal models are presented and an attempt is made to gauge their utility by applying them to test problems in the south-west.

Since the 1950s much attention has been paid to the effect of rapid population growth on the rural societies of the Third World. Yet it is often forgotten that Europe faced similar problems in the past. This book, first published in 1980, suggests some ways of looking at the interrelationships between population growth and agrarian change, and uses these approaches to consider the demographic and agrarian problems of various parts of Europe in the past - in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in the early nineteenth century. These places are then compared with rural societies in the developing world at the present time.