ABSTRACT
Notions about the emergence of hierarchy and dominance within urban systems are very old in US social science. Early writings by Norman S. B. Gras and Roderick McKenzie on “metropolitan dominance” pointed to the linkage between the ascension of a city to a position of economic and political importance and the concomitant subordination of surrounding secondary towns and rural areas to this center. Research directed specifically at urbanization from the dependency/world-system perspective started to appear in the late 1970s. This work began with the premise that the contemporary patterns and processes of urbanization can only be fully understood as part of the expansion of the capitalist world economy. One strain of research on cities in the world-system particularly popular with US trained sociologists stresses a comparative statistical analysis of urbanization and development. Scholars in this school are attempting to formulate hypothesis-testing procedures for the effects of dependency on patterns of urbanization.
