Why was the galactic model created?

Do you live in a galactic city? Cities are growing much faster than rural areas, and the dynamics of urban geography is an important subject to know about for the AP® Human Geography exam. Over the past 100 years, there have been several classic models developed to understand and explain the internal structures of cities and urban areas. In this AP® Human Geography study guide, we are going to see how urban land use has evolved as we consider Chauncey Harris’s galactic city model.

Why Do So Many People Live in the City?

Cities are at the center of every advanced society and act as the hub of economic, social and political activities in an area. They have a variety of shapes and functions, and their geography impacts the daily lives of those who live in the city and surrounding areas. All cities provide their residents a variety of services and functions: shopping, manufacturing, transportation, education, medical, and protective services.

Cities have evolved over time, and their populations have dramatically increased. This has led to urbanization (rapid growth, and migration to large cities). This increase in urban population resulted in rapid expansion of the city and greater urbanization of the society. After the conclusion of World War II, North America experienced rapid urbanization. There was a need for housing outside of the core urban areas due to growing population and demand. The result was the suburbanization of our society. Suburbanization is the movement of people from core urban areas to the outskirts.

Edge Cities

An even more recent phenomenon is the concept of the edge city. An edge city is an urban area with a large suburban residential and business area surrounding it. These areas are tied together by a beltway.

The edge cities started as suburban areas for those who worked in the central cities. Eventually, new shopping complexes developed in these suburban areas, such as enclosed shopping malls, and big-box chains. Many edge cities now a mix of business and some manufacturing centers. Edge cities are the opposite of bedroom communities (a residential suburb inhabited mainly by people who commute to a nearby city for work) because these places have many businesses, but very few residents.

Urban Land Use Models

In the early 1900’s, researchers wanted to find out how cities worked. They developed a variety of urban land use models to help describe and explain different types of cities and the neighborhoods that made up the city. It makes sense that scholars at the University of Chicago developed many of these land use models because Chicago was a city that saw rapid growth in the 19th century.

Some of those models like Burgess’s concentric zone model and Hoyt’s sector model asserted that all models used to explain urban land use have at their center the central business district (CBD). The CDB is found at the heart of every older city and is the area of skyscrapers, business headquarters, and banks.

A few years after Burgess and Hoyt published their findings, fellow Chicagoan geographers Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman came up with their own idea of urban land use, the multiple-nuclei model. They asserted that the CBD was no longer the only center of an urban area or city. In the multiple-nuclei, the “nuclei” are multiple smaller growth centers that developed around the metropolitan area.

Harris and Ullman claimed that, in newer cities, automobile-based intra-urban diffusion was creating a multiple-nuclei structure of urban land use. This mobility allowed for regional centers to specialize their businesses. In the last half of the twentieth century, urban geographers, like Harris (co-author of the multiple-nuclei model) noticed that many of the new suburban CBDs in the United States became specialized toward a particular industrial or service sector. In 1960, Chauncy Harris published his galactic city model.

Galactic City (Peripheral) Model

The galactic city model is also known as the peripheral model. The model is based on the city of Detroit, Michigan and is made up of an inner city, with large suburban residential and business areas surrounding it. These areas are tied together by transportation nodes, like beltways, to avoid traffic congestion. This model takes the Harris and Ullman’s multiple nuclei model one step further. It accounts for the fact that the classic CBD is no longer dominant, but is instead upstaged by several specialized suburban areas. In the galactic city model, the urban area is decentralized and more focus is placed on edge cities.

The galactic city model depicts a city taken over by lives dominated by the car and has been affected by a quickly growing suburb. Models developed in the 1920s and 30’s assumed a lone urban center, which may have been a reliable assumption for much of urban history up to that point, but developments in transportation made these models less realistic by the by the 1950s. Cities would now be built at auto-scale, with parking lots around stores and office complexes. These suburban areas would spread out and single-use zones would separate one another.

Nodes of the Galactic City Model

Central Business District (CBD)

In the middle of the galactic city model is the CBD, as it is in classic urban land use models. However, in the galactic city model, the CBD is very decentralized and somewhat empty due to the move from urban to suburban areas. The galactic city model shows the evolution of the post-industrial city and its movement away from the large central city CBD.

Light Industrial Park

As mentioned above, this model represents a clear-cut decentralization of the commercial urban landscape as the economy transitions to services as the leading form of production. Manufacturing has not disappeared, it has just decreased significantly and has become more specialized. Local governments often subsidized these industries to offset costs and increase job opportunities.

This change in focus means that new facilities are built in specially designed suburban industrial parks and can be smaller and operate on lower-cost land, called greenfield sites. These sites have ample land, parking areas, and access to highways.

Office Parks (Research and Development Parks and Service Organizations

Office parks are located on the beltway because it is easier to get there by car and is closer to the suburbs and not many people drive into the CBD to work. Also, there are the combined employment and shopping centers; this is where both offices and shopping malls are located.

Other types of service organizations are found in the suburban CBDs. A few examples, including those transportation services, biotechnology, medical centers, telecommunications and call centers, banking and finance, government centers, and academic institutions.

Retail Centers and Malls

You will find suburban retail centers in several areas around the city. They are often located at the intersection of the beltway and the artery leading from the old CBD. Large shopping malls are also located outside the CBD and are typically spread out in the suburbs where the people live. Entertainment businesses and other services have also migrated to the suburbs from the central CBD. These companies concentrate in edge cities which are located at highway junctions.

High Technology and Computing

Another trend in the development of office facilities in the suburbs is the growth of suburban corporate campuses. The 1980s saw the rapid growth of office space in the suburbs, rather than in the city. Many of those start-ups were the iconic high-tech corporations of today, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. All of these companies have their headquarters in the suburbs.

The Galactic City Model and the AP® Human Geography Exam

For the AP® Human Geography Exam, you will need to know some urban land use models. Just like other models in AP® Human Geography, knowing the structure is only part of the process. Knowing the composition will help you answer the “where,” but you also need to know the “who, why, and how” behind the different parts of the model.

Classic urban land-use models, like the Hoyt sector model, have been used as FRQs in the past (2002 FRQ, Question #3). If the galactic city model is presented as an FRQ, you could be asked to give examples of what these classic models represent. You may also be asked to explain the different parts of the model and how they relate to each other. So, spend time understanding how the model works, instead of memorizing the shape, and you will be able to earn more points on the question.

Conclusion

Urban land use models were developed to explain different types of cities, their neighborhoods, and how they functioned. But the modern metropolis has shed the confines of its old central-city in the second half of the 20th century. These models are longer capable of keeping up with a new reality where the suburbs are the heart and soul of the American urban landscape.

The galactic city model provides a good representation of the land-use organization of today’s using edge cities and decentralized specialty areas to illustrate how the urban land is used. The CBD is no longer at the center of the action, but several specialized business areas have evolved to support the outskirts of the city.

As we have discussed in this study guide, the models have changed over time. Both the cities themselves have changed, as well as how geographers have looked at cities and their urban patterns. As you go from the concentric zone model to the galactic city model, think of the growth of the city as an evolutionary process on your way to understanding the changing urban landscape.

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