City seeds. Geography and the origins of the European city system

Geography is widely viewed as the important determinant of city location. This paper empirically disentangles the different roles of geography in shaping the European city system. We present a new database that covers all actual cities as well as potential city locations over the period when the foundations for the European city system were laid. We relate each location?s urban chances to its physical, first nature, geography characteristics, and develop a novel empirical strategy to assess how the existing urban system surrounding each location (second nature geography) determines its urban prospects. First nature geography is the dominant determinant of city location until the sixteenth century. Second nature geography becomes important from the seventeenth century onwards, in a way that corresponds closely to predictions from new economic geography theory.