No more than 45 cities had populations over 100,000, and fewer than half of these were situated in Europe. Asia had almost two-thirds of the world’s large-city population, and cities such as Beijing (Peking), Guangzhou (Canton), and Tokyo (Edo) were larger than ancient Rome or medieval Constantinople at their peaks. Cities can project their power into the surrounding countryside, establishing rule over villages and becoming centers of early empires. Modern cities, while no longer sovereign, are vital centers of human activity, facing challenges in governance, technology, culture, and economics.
National wealth also benefited from the new mercantilist policies, but all too often the wealth generated by cities was captured by the state in taxes and then dissipated—either in war or by supporting the splendor of court life and the Baroque glory of palaces and churches. Only in colonial areas, notably the Americas, did the age of expansion see the development of many new cities, and it is significant that the capitals and ports of the colonizing nations experienced their most rapid growth during these years. city index review Under absolutist regimes, however, a few large political and commercial centers grew at the expense of smaller outlying communities and the rural hinterlands. However, in a world of intensifying globalization, all cities are to varying degrees also connected globally beyond these regions. This increased influence means that cities also have significant influences on global issues, such as sustainable development, climate change, and global health.
In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by ring roads moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. Before the year 1000, contacts with rich Byzantine and Islamic areas in the Levant had revitalized the mercantile power in Venice, which grew wealthy from its command of the profitable route to the Holy Land during the Crusades.
Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos or if fortified as a citadel.37 These spaces historically reflect and amplify the city’s centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence.36 Today cities have a city center or downtown, sometimes coincident with a central business district. The term “city” has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. During the Neolithic (New Stone Age)—a relative chronological period that occurred at different times across the world, generally beginning between 9500 and 3000 bce—humans began living in more or less fixed settlements.
In almost all the “new” medieval towns, the role of the merchant was central in catalyzing the long-distance trade of commodities and staple goods. As a type of community, the city may be regarded as a relatively permanent concentration of population, together with its diverse habitations, social arrangements, and supporting activities, occupying a more or less discrete site and having a cultural importance that differentiates it from other types of human settlement and association. In its elementary functions and rudimentary characteristics, however, a city is not clearly distinguishable from a town or even a large village. Mere size of population, surface area, or density of settlement are not in themselves sufficient criteria of distinction, while many of their social correlates (division of labor, nonagricultural activity, central-place functions, and creativity) characterize in varying degree all urban communities from the small country town to the giant metropolis.
While remaining culturally vibrant, the city itself ceased to be an autonomous body politic and became a dependent member of a larger political-ideological whole. The growth of the modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. England led the way as London became the capital of a world empire and cities across the country grew in locations strategic for manufacturing.101 In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the introduction of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, fueling migration from rural to city areas. The Romans, who fell heir to the Hellenistic world, transplanted the city into the areas beyond the Alps inhabited by pastoral-agricultural Celtic and Germanic peoples and made the city a means to empire (a center for military pacification and bureaucratic control) rather than an end in itself. The enjoyment of the imperial Roman peace entailed the acceptance of the status of municipium—a respectable but subordinate rank within the Roman state.
Global governance
A lack of official qualifying criteria results in some particularly small cities, notably St Davids with a population of 1,751 as of 2021update. Cities were founded in the middle of the newly conquered territories and were bound to several laws regarding administration, finances, and urbanism.
- Later cultures such as the Aztec, Andean civilizations, Mayan, Mississippians, and Pueblo peoples drew on these earlier urban traditions.
- Social ethos and organization enforced submission to the common good of earthly survival and heavenly reward.
- While remaining culturally vibrant, the city itself ceased to be an autonomous body politic and became a dependent member of a larger political-ideological whole.
Ancient world
- People choose to live in cities for various reasons, including economic opportunities, cultural attractions, and access to services.
- A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the grid plan, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
- As a type of community, the city may be regarded as a relatively permanent concentration of population, together with its diverse habitations, social arrangements, and supporting activities, occupying a more or less discrete site and having a cultural importance that differentiates it from other types of human settlement and association.
- This form could evolve from successive growth over a long time, with concentric traces of town walls and citadels marking older city boundaries.
The municipia were supported fiscally by taxes on trade, contributions from members of the community, and income from lands owned by each municipium. Over time, however, the idea of public duty gave way to private ambition, especially as Roman citizenship became more universal (see civitas). Municipal functions atrophied, and the city survived into the Byzantine era principally as a mechanism of fiscal administration, although it often remained a locus of educational development and religious and cultural expression. By the 18th century the mercantile classes had grown increasingly disenchanted with monarchical rule.
Governance
Community life centered instead on the fortress (e.g., walled city), whereas the civitas was attached to the precincts of the episcopal throne, as in Merovingian Gaul. City government is almost everywhere the creation of higher political authority—usually state or national. In most Western countries, devolution of powers to the cities occurs through legislative acts that delegate limited self-government to local corporations. Some European countries adopted general municipal codes that permitted centralized administrative control over subordinate areas through a hierarchy of departmental prefects and local mayors. Socialist countries generally employed a hierarchical system of local councils corresponding to, and under the authority of, governing bodies at higher levels of government.
Urban areas
In several places such villages developed into cities supported by domesticated plants and animals. The surplus produced by improved methods of cultivation and stock breeding made it possible to sustain a higher population density while also freeing up some members of the community for craft making and the production of nonessential goods and services. By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities had become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires.
In Italy, medieval communes developed into city-states including the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa. In Northern Europe, cities including Lübeck and Bruges formed the Hanseatic League for collective defense and commerce. Their power was later challenged and eclipsed by the Dutch commercial cities of Ghent, Ypres, and Amsterdam.9394 Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan. With the exceptions of Great Britain and the Netherlands, however, the proportion of national populations resident in urban areas nowhere exceeded 10 percent.
Ancient times
Merchants resented their lack of political influence and assured prestige, and they objected to outmoded regulations that created barriers to commerce—especially those that hindered their efforts to link commercial operations with improved production systems such as factories. Eventually, the merchants would unite with other dissident groups to curb the excesses of absolutism, erase the vestiges of feudalism, and secure a larger voice in the shaping of public policy. In northwestern Europe, where these liberal movements went furthest, the city populations and their influential bourgeois elites played a critical role that was disproportionate to their numbers. Elsewhere, as in Germany, the bourgeoisie was more reconciled to existing regimes or, as in northern Italy, had assumed a passive if not wholly parasitical role. The initiatives of monastic orders, seigneurs, or lords of the manor, and merchants alike fostered a new era of increased tillage, craftsmanship and manufacturing, a money economy, scholarship, growth of rural population, and founding of “new towns,” as distinguished from those “Roman” cities that had survived from the period of Germanic and other encroachments.
Population size, density
Meanwhile, merchant communities had attached themselves to the more-accessible castle towns and dioceses in northern Italy and on the main routes to the Rhineland and Champagne. They later appeared along the rivers of Flanders and northern France and on the west-east road from Cologne to Magdeburg (see Hanseatic League). Cities typically provide municipal services such as education, through school systems; policing, through police departments; and firefighting, through fire departments; as well as the city’s basic infrastructure.
Why do people choose to live in cities?
Early medieval society was a creation of camp and countryside that fulfilled the local imperatives of sustenance and defense. With Germanic variations on late Roman forms, communities were restructured into functional estates, each of which owned formal obligations, immunities, and jurisdictions. What remained of the city was comprehended in this manorial order, and the distinction between town and country was largely obscured when secular and ecclesiastical lords ruled over the surrounding counties—often as the vassals of Germanic kings (see manorialism). Social ethos and organization enforced submission to the common good of earthly survival and heavenly reward. The attenuation of city life in most of northern and western Europe was accompanied by provincial separatism, economic isolation, and religious otherworldliness. Not before the cessation of attacks by Magyars, Vikings, and Saracens did urban communities again experience sustained growth.
The United Nations System has been involved in a series of events and declarations dealing with the development of cities during this period of rapid urbanization. In Mesopotamia, the civilization of Sumer, followed by Assyria and Babylon, gave rise to numerous cities, governed by kings and fostered multiple languages written in cuneiform.73 The Phoenician trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Cydon, and Byblos to Carthage and Cádiz. Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by Babylon and Jerusalem.303 Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the grid plan, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Indus Valley Civilization built Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and other cities on a grid pattern, using ancient principles described by Kautilya, and aligned with the compass points.42234344 The ancient Greek city of Priene exemplifies a grid plan with specialized districts used across the Hellenistic Mediterranean. In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanent, with only two exceptions to this rule due to policy changes.
These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion.139140 Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, but some services may be operated by a higher level of government,141 while others may be privately run.142 Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America’s King assassination riots of 1968. The local government of cities takes different forms including prominently the municipality (especially in England, in the United States, India, and former British colonies; legally, the municipal corporation;134 municipio in Spain and Portugal, and, along with municipalidad, in most former parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires) and the commune (in France and Chile; or comune in Italy). In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century.99100 Western Europe’s larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. The breakdown of public administration and the breach of the frontier led to a revival of parochial outlook and allegiance, but the focus was not upon the city.