Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

Abstract

Do fixed geographic features such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanisation in Britain, but not in France. As urbanisation recovered, medieval towns were more often found in Roman-era town locations in France than in Britain. The resetting of Britain's urban network gave it better access to natural navigable waterways, which mattered for town growth from 1200 to 1800. We conclude that history trapped many French towns in suboptimal locations.Our world is increasingly urbanised, with large cities located in many different environments. While some cities appear well situated, others are hampered by poor access to world markets or threatened by environmental hazards. But it is difficult to tell whether cities are in fact mislocated, because locational advantages that we cannot quantify could offset the costs that we do observe. To investigate whether cities are mislocated, one might examine whether cities that are devastated then relocate, and if so -where. But in recent years a growing literature, going back to Davis and Weinstein (2002), finds that cities are remarkably resilient and recover from shocks. This has generally been interpreted as evidence that locational fundamentals play an important role in pinning down the location of cities. At the same time, Bleakley and Lin (2012) show that once cities develop in particular locations, they persist even when the factors that led to their emergence are no longer important.We contribute to this literature by examining the impact on urban locations of a shock that was sufficiently large to eliminate an urban network. Specifically, we study the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around the middle of the first millennium CE, which wiped out the towns in what is now Britain, but not in France. 1 We are, to the best of our knowledge, the first to examine whether in the aftermath of such a devastating shock, an urban network that gets a fresh start reconfigures in new locations. We also examine whether such a reconfiguration improves towns' locations in terms of their first nature locational fundamentals. In order to carry out our analysis, we develop a new dataset, which tracks the locations of towns in parts of north-western Europe over two millennia.

Path dependence in energy systems and economic development

“…Although infrastructure is arguably the most powerful and long-lasting lock-in, defining the geography of a country and the behaviour of an economy for centuries and even millennia 37,38 , the most commonly referred-to lock-ins relate to technologies (see BOX 2). Yet, evidence is also emerging of behavioural lock-ins associated with energy production and consumption.…”

Social closure, surnames and crime

“…For these reasons, Romans did not adapt roads construction to the environment, but tended to modify the environment for roads construction with a strong preference for straight roads. Several recent contributions have studied the legacy of historical road and transport network on population growth and suburbanisation (Baum-Snow, 2007;Michaels and Rauch, 2014). Carballo et al (2014) studies the effect of infrastructure on trade instrumenting recent changes in the road network with the pre-Columbian Inca road network.…”

Shaking Up the Equilibrium: Natural Disasters, Economic Activity, and Immigration

“…Bleakley and Lin (2012) and Henderson et al (2016) show that fundamentals that were historically important at the time when cities were founded leave a permanent mark on the spatial distribution of economic activity due to scale economies. Hanlon (2016), Moradi (2016), Jedwab et al (2017), and Michaels and Rauch (2018) all obtain similar conclusions by finding persistent e↵ects of historical events on the geographic distribution of economic activity. 12 In contrast, Davis and Weinstein (2002), Brakman et al (2004), Miguel andRoland (2011), andSanso-Navarro, Sanz and find no long-run e↵ects of war-related events on relative city sizes.…”