The urban history, archeology, regional science and urban economics literatures all stress many different locational characteristics as important in driving city location. The availability of ever better, spatially more finegrained, data on the historical and geographical characteristics of cities, and of locations that never developed into a city, makes it possible to start to enrich this debate with (much-needed) empirical evidence. Using this data in combination with more advanced empirical and computational methods will almost surely give us a better, empirically well-grounded, understanding of the relative importance of the many alleged “city seeds” in different parts of the world and at different points in history.

城市历史，考古学，区域科学和城市经济学文献都强调许多不同的区位特征对于推动城市定位至关重要。关于城市以及从未发展成城市的位置的历史和地理特征的更好，空间更细粒度的数据的可用性，使得有可能（需要）经验证据来丰富这一辩论。结合使用这些数据和更先进的经验和计算方法，几乎​​可以肯定地使我们对基于世界各地以及历史上不同地点的许多所谓“城市种子”的相对重要性有更好的，基于经验的了解。。