Thinking Spatially and Data Analysis - North America - Settlement and Transportation

Human settlement depends on many factors in the natural environment: the availability of water, land suitable for agriculture, and appropriate temperatures, to name three. In addition, human activities can also play a role in fostering and directing future settlement patterns. This exercise is designed to shed light on how transportation affects human settlement patterns. The "Historical Evolution of the City" model, developed by John Adams, is key to understanding the role that changing transportation technologies have played in altering the size and shape of cities.

We take for granted a world where cars are the primary mode of transportation.

For most of human history, people have depended on our one natural means of transportation: our feet. Eventually, people learned how to train horses and other beasts of burden so that people could ride them or use them to pull carts and carriages. During the millennia during which animate forms of transportation ruled, cities tended to stay relatively small and compact.

Not until the late 1800s was a new transportation technology--the streetcar--implemented in cities. In many cities, streetcars were later replaced with subway lines that fostered a similar pattern of human settlement.

Then, the introduction of the automobile in the 1920s led to the construction of paved streets, highways, and, later, the interstate highway system.

Each new addition led to a change in the size and shape of cities.

The first part of this set of exercises is designed to help you understand the significance of different forms of transportation to human settlement and the development of cities and their metropolitan areas. As newer forms of transportation made travel quicker and easier, cities have tended to grow outward.

The second part of this set of exercises is designed to help you understand how growth of cities in parts of North America has allowed large urban areas to extend into each other, creating the U.S. Megalopolis and Canada's Main Street.