REGIONAL INTERACTION
The ‘Regional Interaction’ can be defined as a degree of relations within or in-between the places like region, city, town, village and hamlet for a specific set of purposes. Such relations are mostly economic based interactions and it’s always dominated by one the top tier place like city or region. Truman Hartshorn his text of ‘Central Place Theory’ addresses such top tier place as a service center. He states that, the city which serves as a service center forms a mutually interdependent system with its surrounding complementary region. The role of such service center can be understood through the central place theory which provides a conceptual mechanism. A central function of the service center is a retail or service activity which also reflects current technology and behavioral situations within it (Hartshorn 1996). Similarly, patterns of regional interaction can be observed on the national as well as international level. David Kaplan in his text about ‘The Evolution of the American Urban System’ talks about such type of interactions specifically on the national level in United States of America through the concepts of ‘urban systems’ and ‘urban hierarchy’. He explains, urban systems has to do with the ways that cities are related in interlinked, dependent ways, based on changing transportation and communication technologies. Whereas, the urban hierarchy concepts recognizes that urban centers are of different population sizes and have varying levels of economic leverage. It forms the ranked order of cities based on different criteria, such as population size, economic power, retail sales, or number of industrial workers (David Kaplan 2009).
KEY ASPECTS OF REGIONAL INTERACTION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN THE CITY OF CHICAGO
Like all other major cities in United States, the city of Chicago experienced the great expansion of the railroad from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1920. This laid a foundation in creating an interlocked system of cities and in generating an urban hierarchy based on economic ability specifically related to manufacturing and consequent population size. Metropolitan urban systems gradually evolved over time with their growth and economic maturity. The forces responsible for this evolution, spatial arrangement and regional development were primarily in terms of transportation, initiated by railroad then by automobiles and air transport both for passengers as well as for freights. Furthermore, degree of connectivity and level of accessibility was enhanced with the help of telecommunication (David Kaplan 2009). Chicago’s O’Hare airport is one of the busiest international airport in the world and second busiest in the United States. This implies that the city has its regional interaction not just in United States but all over the world in terms of air transportation, thus serving the large set of population and having greater area of sphere of influence. This ‘Windy City’ is also a part of manufacturing belt, developed rapidly and gained importance in manufacturing because of the railroad network.