What physical factors have influenced urban development patterns?
Planners can clearly see how roads, railroads, and seaports have shaped urban development in the Baltimore/Washington area. Urban data bases containing information on highways, railroads, houses, buildings, rivers, seaports, reservoirs, and shore-lines– at specific points in time — dramatically show how modern urbanization results in profound changes to the landscape. In the Baltimore/ Washington area (fig. 3), urban development dramatically increased starting at the turn of the century and continuing to the present day. The hydrography data shows planners the changes in navigable rivers, the development of reservoirs for water supplies, and the changing shoreline resulting from harbor development and salt pond formation.
