MIGRATION AND THE SPREAD AND GROWTH OF URBAN SETTLEMENT
(Lund Studies in Geography, Ser. B. Human Geography No. 26). By Richard L.Morrill '55. Lund, Sweden: C. W. K.Gleerup, 1965. 208 pp.
What a surprise it would be for you to pick up Dick Morrill's "geography" of southern Sweden! Your surprise would reach high register when you find that hidden behind that stable, old facade of Geography is not a comfortingly pedantic (though hard to recall) roster of place names to which lists of products and other miscellany could be attached. In its stead you find yourself staring into the inkwell of a geography of probabilistic places in a contingent universe, randomly generated and handsomely explicated, vis. this is different stuff. Holy Place Names! These probable places spin into reality like winning numbers on a Monte Carlo gaming table; be assured it is a simulating experience as you observe settlement patterns materialize out of tables of random numbers. Holy Lobatchevsky!
Since most of us would boggle at the mathematics employed to examine the spatial and temporal ordering of population clusters let us see what Morrill seeks in his study. In his own words "the object of this research is to attempt some explanation of that kind of settlement pattern we might observe in any developed country." This is an enterprise sure to warm the heart of John Macy, this year's prima voce at the College's graduation exercises.
Following a critical review of the abundant theoretical geographical literature dealing with urban development, Morrill presents a general model of the growth and spread of urban settlements. He then employs his model in Sweden in different historical periods. Morrill's model is probabilistic; he uses simulation techniques to project population distributions (agglomerated and dispersed) in Smaland, Sweden in 1810-1820, 1820-1840 and 1960-1980. He follows this with a continuous simulation of settlement conditions during the period 1860-1960. The result of this work is a close fit to the statistical distribution of centers as to size, type, and spatial ordering. He even arrives at a fair fit to actual spatial distributions. The discrepancy between predicted urban locations and actual urban locations is attributable to the failure of the model to take full account of the strong influence of previous moves and contacts of migrants upon their migration choices. Injected in this treatise is a dandy computer program which aided in the multitude of calculations needed to test his notions.
Morrill's study is but one of a burgeoning number of mathematical-geographical studies that have been appearing in the last ten years. It is not surprising that, like Morrill's study, many of these works have focused on urban areas. The main reason for this is the abundance and variety of quantitatively tractable data on cities and towns. This research trend in Geography, which stresses the increasing abstraction of the spatial characteristics of our physical and cultural milieu can be expected to continue, especially in the treatment of urban studies.
Geography, like most social sciences, has been undergoing change in recent years, especially in the realm of the greater use of mathematical tools for analysis and estimation. These tools have lent added weight to a discipline with a rich tradition of description. Dick Morrill's work is representative of this change and we applaud its arrival.
Instructor in Geography
