ABSTRACT
In this section we first describe what real patterns of settlement and urban hierarchy are like, and then try to see whether a ‘self-organizing’ process based on reasonable interactions between people can possibly lead to such patterns. How do towns and cities grow and decline, structuring the landscape, the flows of people and goods and also shaping the lives of the inhabitants. Essentially, the story of increasing urbanisation is one of migration over a long period and of the spatial concentration of economic investments in particular areas. Clearly there is a relation between the two, since economic investment will go to places where there is a workforce, appropriate skills, and a market, and people will migrate to areas with job opportunities. It is this kind of ‘crosscatalytic’ effect that will generate the growing centres of urban concentration in our model, whilst the competition for space will set limits on how high urban densities can rise.
