Seaports Are Not Aberrant CasesAuthor(s): James BirdSource: Area, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1970), pp. 65-68Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000494 .

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Dating Hedges 65

a two or three species hedge to begin with and now be a five or six species hedge. This latter hedge would be indistinguishable botanically from a hedge, planted as pure hawthorn, late in the 14th century. In short Hooper's hedgerow history hypothesis can be over-ruled by the personal preference of the planter.

Hence I prefer to state a general theory in terms of the rate of colonization, one new species each century, rather than in terms of number of species and absolute age of the hedge. But there are many areas where number of species is a good guide to the age of the hedge and I believe it would be wrong to ignore such evidence entirely.

References The following are all that I know of which contain any pertinent matter. Grose, D., 1957. The Flora of Wiltshire, Devizes. Hooper, M. D., 1965. Devon Hedges. Journal of the Devon Trust for Nature Conservation.

7, 263-66. Hooper, M. D., 1966. The History of Huntingdonshire Hedges. Records of Huntingdon

shire. 1, 17-20. Hooper, M. D., 1966. Hedgerows in Cambridgeshire. Nature in Cambs. 9, 23-9. Hooper, M. D., 1968. Lincolnshire Hedges. Newsletter (of Lincs Trust for Nature Con

servation). 32, 8-10. Hooper, M. D., (in press). Hedges and Local History. BSBI/SCLH Conference. Hoskins, W. G., 1967. Fieldwork in Local History. Faber and Faber, London. Hoskins, W. G., 1970. History from the Farm. Faber and Faber, London. (see especially

pp. 47-8, 53-4, 58, 76, 81 and 87).

Jarvis, P., 1969. Review of Pennington's, The History of British Vegetation. Geographical Journal. 135, 591.

Pennington, W., 1960. The History of British Vegetation. English UP London.

Seaports are not aberrant cases James Bird, University of Southampton

Central place theory is unassailable; most seaports are places located palpably eccentric to their hinterlands; therefore, seaports are cases exceptional to central place theory. This is not only a rather crude syllogism, but also rather dispiriting for the student of ports. Central place theory is unassailable because, as W. Bunge (1966, Figures 9.30 and 9.31) has shown, if the right assumptions are tightened, hexagons will crystallize out. Conversely, if one relaxes the assumptions on which the theory is based, the patterns get more lifelike. What if the plain is no longer isotropic? What if there is a transport artery here but not there? What is the population is not uniform but here

Mennonite, there modern Canadian, here in rich income groups, and there just plain poor? Central place theory is also unassailable by reason of the place it has won in modern geographical thought. The opening part of the syllogism holds.

The seaport feature of eccentric location is at first sight also rather a nuisance in industrial location theory. W. Alonso (1964) develops the idea of the median location

which could be defined as the site where half the transport costs are on one side of it. In due course he finds himself up against

One special case [which] deserves attention since it accounts in large measure for the existence of many great cities of the world [-special case?]. . . This is the case of points of transhipment, of which a seaport is a prime example. (p. 86)

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66 Seaports are not aberrant cases

It might be thought that industrial geographers would be content if 'agglomeration and scale economies' were somehow built into central place theory, but for G. Alexan dersson (1967), this is not so.

In the real world, the 'central place' often seems to have an eccentric location, which would suggest that the gateway concept, never developed into a general theory, should merit reconsideration and further development and refinement. (p. 19)

Alexandersson quotes R. D. McKenzie (1933) as the first to suggest the concept of gateway cities, but McKenzie's ideas are merely sketched out in a few scattered sentences such as:

During this period of [US] population dispersion the city was for the most part the child and servant of expanding rural settlement; it followed rather than directed population spread. Gateway cities arose at entrance points to producing regions and functioned as collecting centres for the basic products from surrounding settlement and as distributing points for manufactured goods brought in from outside territory. These gateway centres maintained contact with tributary territory through a community hierarchy of villages, towns, and cities established on the basis of railway transportation. Thus ih- basic pattern of modern American settle

ment was formed. (pp. .5).... Gateway cities ... in many instances ... became freight-rate breaking points, thereby obtaining certain advantages as commercial distributing centres. (p. 140)

This may have been true of the central US gateways, but further west:

The towns were the spearheads of the frontier. Planted far in advance of the line of settlement, they held the West for the approaching population (R. C. Wade, 1959, p. 1; see also B. J. L. Berry, 1967, 108-11).

Several theorists, deductive and inductive, have recognized the importance of the outside stimulus to settlement generation. The Taafe-Morrill-Gould model of trans port and settlement evolution in a developing country (1963) requires ports to play a leading role. R. Murphey (1964) pointed out that Asian port cities were rare before the advent of the exotic European. And in a paper on the conception of cities, E. Smolensky and D. Ratajczak (1965) find themselves forced to modify their Loschian landscape.

The advantages of water-transport and proximity to the transport net outside the region shift the larger cities from the centre of the region to . . . points on the peri phery... (p. 101)

A. J. Rose (1966) traces out the answer to his question:

... will such a pattern [of central places] ... prevail if the central point is created at the outset? Will it occur if, instead of being fundamentally a response to the needs of a rural population, the urban centres act as a springboard from which the pioneer makes his attack on the wilderness. . .? (p. 5)

His answer is that metropolitan primacy is the normal state, and that if his theoretical 'isolated continent' has been developed from an overseas base, the metropolitan

nodes will be the pioneer seaports. The gateway concept not only allows a market area universe to be seen developing through its transport connections with other universes, but also embraces the necessary concepts of initial advantage and cumulative causation (A. Pred, 1965) operating both through time and through selected gateways.

Consider the simple case of a country with a small peninsular appendage. A regional centre, R, is likely to arise in the middle of the shoulder by which the peninsula is joined to the main body of the country-a location where the settlement can act as ambassador for the peninsula to the rest of the country and through which all links to and from the peninsula can be focused. The only likely rivals to such a location are coastal port sites which might pull R off the geometric centre of the peninsular shoulder. Imagine next a provincial boundary existing across the peninsular shoulder. The city, R, offset from the geometric centre of the peninsula may yet be central to a service area lying on either side of the provincial boundary. Now allow the provincial

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Seaports are not aberrant cases 67

boundary to become a coast. The peninsula becomes an island in which PR, a port city, is of course still situated off the centre of the island. But as far as its port function is concerned PR can be regarded as serving a discontinuous total space consisting of the contiguous hinterland in the island and the overseas areas, or forelands, with which the port is connected by its shipping. Again, this total service area can be thought of as lying athwart the boundary, now represented by the coast. These remarks apply only to the port function of PR, a city which has many other functions.

These ideas can perhaps be summed up by saying that the gateway function of settlements can pull them off the centre of the areas they serve-the gateway concept and this seems to be the major distortion introduced by transport into the idea of settlements at the centre of service areas of a size proportional to settlement size and rank. More sophisticated studies of inputs and outputs and of imports and exports

would allow some measurement of the gateway function in the real world. One way of testing the concept is to go back to back to a point in time to postulate how networks

might develop between settlements, leading to a selective growth of the settlements subsequently. The generated model patterns can then be compared with what actually happened (K. J. Kansky (1963) used Sicily as an example). W. R. Black (1967) experi mented in generating the railway network of southern Maine from 1840. He found that the most important hypotheses were: (1) nearness to a point at which the network began; (2) a gravity model formulation; and (3) closeness of route link orientation with regional orientation. In a region with important overseas trading links, regional orienta tion is channelled through relatively few coastal locations. One can then imagine the implications for the development of nodes and routes in the transport network of the hinterland-leading back to the idea of spatial organization based on geometrically 'eccentric centres'.

The gateway concept certainly looks hopeful for the student of seaports, just as the industrial geographer leans towards explanations based on agglomeration and scale economies (A. Pred, 1966, 13-6). If central place theory/Loschian market area type of explanations are considered the only basis for a location theory, then such features as agglomeration effects must be considered as 'distortions' (P. Haggett, 1965, 135ff); and seaports would certainly be at 'exceptional' locations. Perhaps it would be more helpful to envisage a triangular explanation map. If an explanation of the location pattern of any one of the settlements plotted within the triangle is made solely in terms of the most distant explanation apex, then the more that settlement will appear as a distortion from the so-called'normal' explanation chosen, or the more numerous the assumptions that will have to be made to bring it into real-world line.

Seaports would look more like theoretical central places if all the bits of space with which they had connections were added up and the oceans suppressed. But this is a rather cumbersome operation, and surely impractical in the case of large ports, so some other simplifying concept is needed. Central place theory is unassailable but only as a partial explanation of the location of settlements. When a full gamut of possible explanations is considered, seaports are seen not as aberrant cases, but merely located at the seaboard end of a continuum of locations, the opposite type of which

might well be exemplified in southern Germany, East Anglia, or wherever a geographer has profitably used his hexagonal spectacles. It seems a pity that at least three types of explanation are needed, separately or in combination, but it is worth taking trouble to embed seaports firmly within location theory and hammer another nail in the coffin of the unique.

References

Alexandersson, G., 1967. Geography of Manufacturing, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Alonso, W., 1964. Location theory, in J. Friedmann and W. Alonso (eds.), Regional Develop

ment and Planning. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 78-106. Berry, B. J. L., 1967. Geography of Market Centres and Retail Distribution, Prentice-Hall,

Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

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68 Seaports are not aberrant cases

Black, W. R., 1967. Growth of the railway network of Maine: a multivariate approach, Discussion Papers, 5. University of Iowa, Department of Geography.

Bunge, W., 1966. Theoretical Geography. Gleerup, Lund. Dacey, M. F., 1962. Analysis of central place and point patterns by a nearest neighbour method,

Lund Studies in Geography, Series B, Human Geography 24, 55-75. Kansky, K. J., 1963. Structure of transport networks: relationships between network geometry

and regional characteristics, Research Papers, 84. University of Chicago, Department of Geography.

McKenzie, R. D., 1933. The Metropolitan Community. Russell and Russell, New York. Murphey, R., 1964. The city in the swamp: aspects of the site and early growth of Calcutta,

Geographical Journal, 130, 241-56. Pred, A., 1965. Industrialization, initial advantage, and American metropolitan growth,

Geographical Review, 55, 158-85. Pred, A., 1966. The Spatial Dynamics of US Urban Industrial Growth 1800-1914, MIT. Quinn, J. A., 1943. The hypothesis of the median location, American Sociological, Review 8,

148-56. Rose, A. J., 1966. Metropolitan primacy as the normal state, Pacific Viewpoint, 7, 1-27. Smolensky, E. and Ratajczak, D., 1965. The conception of cities, Explorations in Entre

preneurial History, 2, second series, 90-131. Taafe, E. J., Morrill, R. L. and Gould, P. R., 1963. Transport expansion in underdeveloped

countries: a comparative analysis, Geographical Review, 53, 503-29. Wade, R. C., 1959. The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities 1790-1830, Harvard

University Press, Cambridge.

Components analysis in geographical research

R. J. Johnston, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

In their attempts to unravel the functional relationships which make up the man environment system, geographers are invariably confronted by the complexity of these structures and by their inability to measure precisely the concepts which they are investigating. The result is often a large data matrix, comprising numerous measure

ments on groups of overlapping variables, within which it is virtually impossible to perceive the latent order and to elucidate the hypothesized relationships. In order to achieve their goal of explicit theory, therefore, geographers have been forced to develop, or, more usually, to adopt and adapt, methods of manipulating the data matrix. This process is a continuing one, in which it is necessary constantly to re-assess the value of the techniques being applied (Gould, 1970) and to suggest improved methodologies; this is the aim of the present note with regard to one commonly employed technique.

Principal components analysis, and sometimes the associated, more powerful technique of factor analysis, has become a common geographical research tool (Thomp son and Hall, 1969). It is generally used inductively, as a fairly mechanical way of uncovering aspects of the underlying order in a data matrix. Redundant relationships are removed through the substitution of a reduced set of hybrid variables for the original set, and the new structures are usually identified by the cluster of original constructs which they replace. (Introduction to the technique is given in Rummel, 1967; Harman, 1960 is the standard text; Horst, 1965, gives computer programs).

In using this family of techniques geographers have in no way approached the psychologists' sophistication (Cattell, 1966), although Berry (1966) and others have conducted interesting studies. Numerous methodological, applicative, and interpreta tive questions await investigation (see Riddell, 1969, for one attempt): for example,

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