ABSTRACT
Urban geography developed in the late 1940s from a timely mix of traditional geography, the influence of the Chicago School of Sociology, and contemporary responses to city planning, and emerged as a systematic area of study in the 1950s with the modernist goals of contemporary social sciences. Borrowing is a process that greatly contributed to the development of the new subdiscipline. The fact that this is the only section in The Urban Geography Reader that contains work by non-geographers underscores the significance of the field’s net borrowing at its inception. Arguably, Burgess’ concentric zone model has heuristic value in examining portions of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century North American cities. Although Hoyt’s sector model was viewed as progress in theorizing the internal structure of the city, the impact of his work was experienced more widely because of its influence on the interpretation of changing housing markets.
