ABSTRACT
Saul Bellow calls the city “the expression of the human experience it embodies, and this includes all personal history.”1 This is to see the city from a viewpoint different from that of classic geographical descriptions. Urban geographers have developed models to predict phenomena such as growth or decline, demographic patterns, traffic flows and economic potential. Some have taken a mechanistic view of cities and used mathematical formulae to solve urban problems. Others, notably Mumford, have been more conscious of cities as places of human habitation, while some, such as Griffith Taylor, view cities in terms of historical development.2 Different ideological viewpoints have informed these descriptive-predictive analyses of the city; logical empiricism has dominated the debate, but Marxist-inspired work, such as that by David Harvey on the bid-rent curve, has recently made its impact.3
