ABSTRACT
The functional classification of cities, in terms of their occupational structure, has been worked on by various investigators in recent years. In spite of their more or less sophisticated statistical techniques, they do not bring us nearer to a meaningful assessment of the role of the city as a regional focus. Chauncy D. Harris 1 presented a quantitative, but subjective, classification of American cities. This classification is based on an analysis of the 605 functional, rather than political, units, with over 10,000 inhabitants, 140 were metropolitan districts with one city of over 50,000 inhabitants. The study arrived at nine principal types of towns as follows—manufacturing cities; retail centres; diversified centres; wholesale centres; transport centres; mining towns; University towns; and resort and retirement towns. There is a marked concentration of the manufacturing towns (44 per cent. of the metropolitan districts and 43 per cent. of the smaller cities) in the Manufacturing Belt north of the Ohio and lower Missouri and east of the Mississippi. There is also a secondary concentration in the south-eastern States from Virginia to northern Alabama, with a sprinkling of such cities on the Pacific littoral. The retail centres have over one-half of their workers in retailing out of the total in manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing. They are mostly smaller cities outside the main manufacturing belt (under 10 per cent. of the metropolitan districts and 20 per cent. of the smaller cities). About one-half of these cities lie in a north–south belt between the ninety-fifth and hundredth meridians near the eastern margin of the High Plains and near the western limit of arable agriculture. This is a continuously settled area of highly commercialized agriculture in which there is certainly little manufacturing, and servicing is a primary function of its urban centres. The diversified cities with a good representation of trade and manufacturing (25 per cent. of the metropolitan districts and 20 per cent. of the smaller cities) include four of the five largest cities in the country. They are especially numerous in the transitional area between the manufacturing belt and the band of retail centres noted above. They include major cities in the manufacturing belt (New York, Chicago, Boston) and five state capitals. A number of these cities also lie in the transitional zone towards the belt of retail centres (St. Louis, Nashville, Birmingham, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Des Moines, Kansas City, Little Rock, Montgomery, and Tampa). Still others are the oil-refining and flour-milling centres in the belt of retail centres. Wholesale cities include cities engaged in the assembly of agricultural products and large cities engaged in general distribution. Transport cities include eighteen railroad centres and fourteen ports. There are only fourteen mining towns (e.g. Butte for copper mining), most of which are smaller centres. Although mining may be important in larger cities it is obscured by other activities. There are seventeen University towns, all small centres, and twenty-two resort and retirement towns.
