Diffusion of Innovation

Abstract

The study of urban systems accompanied the beginning of quantitative geography in the 1960s, and is quickly becoming one of the discipline’s most rapidly developing fields (Murayama 1982a). From concepts of the 1960s that emphasized an explanation of static spatial order in one time period such as King’s urban dimension (1966), Berry’s distribution patterns of urban systems (1961), and Nystuen and Dacey’s (1961) functional and nodal structures of urban systems, this field developed into an explanation of the dynamic spatial order of urban systems (Sugiura 1978), evolving to the point where, like this study, it shares common ground with diffusion studies emphasizing spatial processes. In other words, it began to evolve into spatial processes studies (spatial analysis) integrating spatial and temporal components. Representative of such studies are the rate and channels of diffusion of information and innovation in urban systems (Pederson, 1970), the growth of urban systems brought about by diffusion itself (Pred, 1980, pp.119–141), and the way that cyclic economic fluctuations spread among cities (Jeffery and Webb, 1972).