Quote:
Originally Posted by jd3189
New York City is at the southernmost point of New York State. Chicago is in Northern Illinois. Detroit is in Southern Michigan. Boston is located in Eastern Massachusetts. LA and Miami are at the southernmost parts of their states as well and etc.
I know geographical features had something to do with many of these, but I’m curious to hear if there are other reasons for this being so.
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Cities locate where they do based on transportation and agriculture (access to water)
Actually scratch that, cities locate all over but they grow large and important if they have economic reason to do so. Some of this can be arbitrary like Governments building cities and forcing people into them but those are few and far between.
So you'll find large cities:
#1 at ports or heads of navigation (AKA as far as ocean going ships can head in up river) Philly, NYC, London, Houston etc..
#2 at natural transportation hubs, where two rivers meet (st Luis, Chicago, think of the great lakes as essentially a river)
#3 at the natural end point where barges can take goods/transportation nodes via trains and now highways or near the entrance to a major mountain pass transportation route. These typically take place at the natural organic regional centers (Chicago fits this category too) Dallas, Atlanta, Denver etc.
Basically its trade that determines where large cities are going to be, and most trade is the result of geographic features and to some degree human engineering to enhance or overcome those features.
There are some other unique situations in extreme climates like Columbia and Venezuela where the cities are high altitude because building a city in a jungle or in a desert with no water does not work well altitude means cooler weather and more traditional agriculture, or just water at all. That is why places like Caracas, Bogota and Quito are high altitude mountain cities that seam antithetical to development.
Desert cities work only when there is an easily accessible amount of water via rivers and ground water.
But in the end Geography is probably the biggest determining factor, now why are some cities SPECIFICALLY the ones that grow like say Ny instead of Bayonne or Philly instead of Camden? etc etc. Thats all a mater of local randomness and issues that you'd have to look into history to find.
(For example Venice being built out in the estuary instead of on shore because the original city in the region was destroyed by the Huns)