An urban geographer before his time: C. Warren Thornthwaite's 1930 doctoral dissertation

Abstract

In 1930, a time when human geography was not considered to be among the emerging analytic social sciences and when urban geography barely existed as an identifiable subfield, C. Warren Thornthwaite, later a gargantuan figure in American climatology, was awarded a doctorate under Carl O. Sauer at the University of California, Berkeley. In his dissertation, ‘Louisville, Kentucky: a study in urban geography’, Thornthwaite analysed land-use zonation, commercial strip development, daytime–night-time populations, community formation, elevation and land values, functional regions and cultural areas, spatial competition and optimal location, buying power and residential distribution. Thornthwaite's urban geography was centered unmistakably in the spatial tradition, and his innovative research – based on aerial photographs, intensive field observations, city directories and detailed mapping – treated concepts that were to become central to urban geography as it developed in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Urban geography, however, evolved independently of Thornthwaite's contributions. Thornthwaite directed no graduate students, and his unpublished dissertation was not cited until a perfunctory reference in 1954. A second citation, not appearing until almost 30 years later, described it as ‘a major synthesis’. Thornthwaite's dissertation was not only an anomaly in the career of its author but also an anachronism in the history of urban geography.

Estimating temporary populations: a systematic review of the empirical literature

“…Transportation data, collected via cordon counts, or more recently by smart cards, are an important source of information, particularly for diurnal population estimates. Early work from the United States can be traced back to Thornthwaite who estimated the daytime population of a Central Business District using data from a traffic survey (1929; cited in Wheeler and Brunn, 2002). Others followed including Breese (1947), Sharp (1955) and Weir (1960).…”

‘This scene is itself living’: Buildings as landscapes in transatlantic human geography, 1870–1970

“…Semple (1900) herself published a synthetic geography of Louisville, focusing solely on how its 'site' along the Ohio River boded well or ill for a city to rise. 13 Frederick Valentine Emerson's Geographic Interpretation of New York City (1909), the University of Chicago's first geography dissertation on an urban topic, followed similar lines (and see Wheeler and Brunn, 2002).…”

Selecting Key Village by Quantitative and Qualitative Methods

“…Based on being practicable and possible collection of information, the resident population and the distance between villages are chosen as main factors [6,7]. The interaction between one village and each other village is calculated first, and then being summed.…”