The Spatial Dynamics of U. S. Urban-Industrial Growth 1800-1914

by Allan Pred

Genres: Geography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 1966

About the author

Allan Richard Pred

Reviews

[Andrew]

This was my first book-length reading of Allan Pred, a geographer I've admired for many years. Granted, this was an early work, before he penned the Marxian humanist essays I'm more familiar with. However, as a primer on the evolution of the US city from mercantilist to capitalist enterprise, it's illustrative, and in its early use of more qualitative concepts being treated with the same rigor as its quantitative concepts, it's a time capsule of a time when social science was taken more seriously by the public at large as a program in and of its own right rather than being treated as a redheaded stepchild of the hard sciences or as an aggregation of feels. This is an academic text -- and I read it as such -- so it's not likely to attract many readers, but I looked it at with the admiration I feel for a well-compiled spreadsheet.