1.Good/bad parts of town are extensions of historical preferences, going back years, in themselves determined by which were residential areas and which were the “industrial areas”.
Well, in some cases whole areas were industrial, in some there were mainly residences but the few industries were degrading to the residential quality of life, and in some the houses were originally just built very cheaply. The corresponding opposite cases also existed. And then, particularly in the West, the non-agricultural history of a given city sector has been short. Where a large quarry, say, was built, or a sewage-treatment plant, that in itself could’ve been a large enough deterrent to rather decent homes. That sort of thing I referred to as ‘large cultural land features’.
2.Industrial areas were generally selected for access to transportation: using things like barges or sailing vessels, as the case may be in ocean and river ports, there were preferred ways to dock before the readt access of strong-powered cargo vessels. Even today (former merchant seaman speaking) wind figures in approach preferences… Easier to have the wind push you to the dock in large heavy vessels than try and dock against it. Local variances in river towns depending on local currents (explains perhaps St. Louis)
So, that’s an elaboration of my ‘large natural land features’ – bodies of water. I have no knowledge as to how significant this commercial wind-water interaction might’ve been.
*3. Most rivers in the Northern Hemispheres *
How many Northern Hemispheres can you fit on one globe? 
run N to S,
Looking at maps of N. Amer., Eur. & Asia – except in the case of Russia (where the rivers almost all do not drain to a warm-water port), I’d say that’s not true at all.
leaving southern, export-transit economies as opposed to production economies (regional N vrs S issue)…
So here you’re considering N/S effects on countries, provinces or continents as a whole, not cities? And then are you concluding that “export-transit economies” achieve considerably less income than do “production economies”? I suppose so. I think the South in the US, though, came out poorer overall, simply because of the land-baron nature of plantations (agricultural “production economies”), i.e., they supported a small number of wealthy overlords and scads of slaves and serfs. But on this larger-territory scale, I simply go for the latitude thing – weather that requires and suits greater industry in the N, while same that does not demand and impedes much industry in the S. In CA-US, where there is a high in- and outflow of both N & S peoples, and both extensive agriculture and extensive moderate-grade industry, you see the both effects going on. But my interest here was strictly at the city level.
So, having set up your hypotheses, where are your lists of example cities?
Except for large ocean ports, I don’t think what you discuss has been all that influential, at least in the last 100 yr. And if I take San Francisco, as an example of a moderately large ocean port, its dock areas have always extended from N to SE facing, on the bay side, of course, for protection and water depth, not because of wind direction. But anyhow, I don’t see that they have much of any effect on the mostly NW-to-SE economic downslope in that city. Oakland’s dock area, the more industrially significant in the bay, is on its NW side, because that is the choice of bay water is only on the W, and the NW is the closest to the Golden Gate (the entrance to the bay). The effect of WW II, as to shipbuilding there, put many poor blacks on NW Oakland flats, but in recent years far more poor blacks, Latinos and whites have settled in SE Oakland flats. The hills, being on a long NE edge of this NW-SE-running town, the well-off population lives on that side, particularly to the N. So presently the port influence on the city’s economic distribution is really nil. Sacramento has been significantly, and still is a little, a river port, but I don’t know much about the economic layout of Sacto, so I’ll pass on that.
Ray
