The Meaning of Urban Centrality in a Medium-Sized Eighteenth-Century Town

Abstract

In May 1777, the council of the elders of the Swedish town of Turku (Åbo) decided to establish a new principle for the taxation of taverns. Previously, the taverns had been taxed at the same level, but that arrangement had been unpopular because some taverns were located in more convenient places than others and, thus, had higher product sales. The new taxation system divided the taverns into four categories according to their location and ease of access in the topography of the town; those in the 'best' places were to pay four times as much tax a month as those in the 'less attractive' places. 1 Reading between the lines, the tax reform reveals that there was an understanding of the town as a symbolic topography of more central and more peripheral places. But what did eighteenth-century townspeople mean when they wrote about 'better' or 'worse' places? More generally, how can we use historical sources and methods to approach early modern symbolic understandings of urban topography?In human geography and economic geography, the exploration of centrality stems from Walter Christaller's central place theory (1933), which describes an abstract model for generating hierarchical levels of centrality in human residential settlements. 2 Since Christaller's time, central place theory has been revaluated and thoroughly debated, and the phenomenon of centrality and centralisation has been studied in human geography from a wide range of standpoints, including urban land value, traffic and distance, accessibility, power and administration, and qualitative and imagined dimensions of the urban experience. 3 Recent developments in the research on centrality and central places include, among other things, the use of big data and a shift towards networks and clusters. 4 In the field of history, however, relatively few scholars have immersed themselves in the study of urban centrality as a historical phenomenon. One of the earliest examples is Hans-Heinrich Blotevogel's research on eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Westphalia, where he investigated the relationship