ABSTRACT
Griffith Taylor could still state in the 1940s, at a time when many classic urban studies had already been written, that urban geography was in its infancy. This statement reflected the restricted visions of geography as a discipline at this time, centrally interested in the relationship between people and environment and the natural science paradigm of environmentalism. Most geographies studied rural and regional landscapes with the few urban studies reflecting their disciplinary context. There were
site and situation studies, concerned with the physical qualities of the land over which urban settlements had developed and with locational qualities
urban settlement studies that examined the spatial distributions of towns and cities, networks of urban places and their connectivities, and notions of hinterlands or market areas
urban morphologies that studied the internal structure of the city, its morphology or physical fabric, the types of buildings, layout of streets and general town plan, and the relation of these to the historical phases of urban growth
studies of the historical evolution of the cities and their regional settings that demonstrated the diversity of urban forms, changes over time and cultural variations at a regional scale.
