Visions of Metropolis: William Gilpin and Theories of City Growth in the American West

Page 21: "In the early and mid-nineteenth century, promoters who sought justification for grandiose plans to create cities in new regions of the American West [such as William Gilpin] turned to nature and geography. Woven into their argument that natural forces determined success in urban experiments were various threads of nineteenth-century thought: a geopolitical emphasis on the importance of central land masses in a society's development; the old geographical-historical idea that great cities are inevitably located along the major rivers of the world; and the view that mankind moves ever westward."