HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

A city is a
human settlement In geography, statistics and archaeology, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community in which people live. The complexity of a settlement can range from a minuscule number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of ci ...
of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be defined as a permanent and densely settled place with administratively defined boundaries whose members work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. Cities generally have extensive systems for
housing Housing, or more generally, living spaces, refers to the construction and assigned usage of houses or buildings individually or collectively, for the purpose of shelter. Housing ensures that members of society have a place to live, whether it ...
,
transportation Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, ...
,
sanitation Sanitation refers to public health conditions related to clean drinking water and treatment and disposal of human excreta and sewage. Preventing human contact with feces is part of sanitation, as is hand washing with soap. Sanitation systems ...
,
utilities A public utility company (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure). Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and r ...
,
land use Land use involves the management and modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as settlements and semi-natural habitats such as arable fields, pastures, and managed woods. Land use by humans has a long h ...
, production of goods, and
communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...
. Their density facilitates interaction between people,
government organisations State ownership, also called government ownership and public ownership, is the ownership of an industry, asset, or enterprise by the state or a public body representing a community, as opposed to an individual or private party. Public ownersh ...
and
businesses Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." Having a business name does not separat ...
, sometimes benefiting different parties in the process, such as improving efficiency of goods and service distribution. Historically, city-dwellers have been a small proportion of humanity overall, but following two centuries of unprecedented and rapid
urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly t ...
, more than half of the
world population In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for the ...
now lives in cities, which has had profound consequences for global sustainability. Present-day cities usually form the core of larger
metropolitan area A metropolitan area or metro is a region that consists of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories sharing industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructures and housing. A metro area usually com ...
s and
urban area An urban area, built-up area or urban agglomeration is a human settlement with a high population density and infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas are created through urbanization and are categorized by urban morphology as cities, t ...
s—creating numerous commuters traveling towards
city centre A city centre is the commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart of a city. The term "city centre" is primarily used in British English, and closely equivalent terms exist in other languages, such as "" in Fren ...
s for employment, entertainment, and education. However, in a world of intensifying
globalization Globalization, or globalisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term ''globalization'' first appeared in the early 20t ...
, 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 Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
,
global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...
, and global health. Because of these major influences on global issues, the international community has prioritized investment in
sustainable cities The sustainable city, eco-city, or green city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact (commonly referred to as the triple bottom line), and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromisi ...
through
Sustainable Development Goal 11 Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11 or Global Goal 11), titled " sustainable cities and communities", is one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. The official mission of SDG 11 is ...
. Due to the efficiency of transportation and the smaller land consumption,
dense Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematically ...
cities hold the potential to have a smaller
ecological footprint The ecological footprint is a method promoted by the Global Footprint Network to measure human demand on natural capital, i.e. the quantity of nature it takes to support people or an economy. It tracks this demand through an ecological accounti ...
per inhabitant than more sparsely populated areas. Therefore, compact cities are often referred to as a crucial element of fighting climate change. However, this concentration can also have significant negative consequences, such as forming
urban heat island An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparen ...
s, concentrating pollution, and stressing water supplies and other resources. Other important traits of cities besides population include the capital status and relative continued occupation of the city. For example, country capitals such as
Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...
,
London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
,
Mexico City Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
,
Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
,
Nairobi Nairobi ( ) is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The name is derived from the Maasai phrase ''Enkare Nairobi'', which translates to "place of cool waters", a reference to the Nairobi River which flows through the city. The city proper ha ...
,
New Delhi New Delhi (, , ''Naī Dillī'') is the capital of India and a part of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House ...
,
Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
,
Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...
,
Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
,
Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 ...
,
Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
,
Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...
,
Manila Manila ( , ; fil, Maynila, ), officially the City of Manila ( fil, Lungsod ng Maynila, ), is the capital of the Philippines, and its second-most populous city. It is highly urbanized and, as of 2019, was the world's most densely populate ...
, and
Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
reflect the identity and apex of their respective nations. Some historic capitals, such as
Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...
and
Xi'an Xi'an ( , ; ; Chinese: ), frequently spelled as Xian and also known by #Name, other names, is the list of capitals in China, capital of Shaanxi, Shaanxi Province. A Sub-provincial division#Sub-provincial municipalities, sub-provincial city o ...
, maintain their reflection of cultural identity even without modern capital status. Religious holy sites offer another example of capital status within a religion,
Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
,
Mecca Mecca (; officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, commonly shortened to Makkah ()) is a city and administrative center of the Mecca Province of Saudi Arabia, and the Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. It is inland from Jeddah on the Red ...
,
Varanasi Varanasi (; ; also Banaras or Benares (; ), and Kashi.) is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world. * * * * The city has a syncretic t ...
,
Ayodhya Ayodhya (; ) is a city situated on the banks of holy river Saryu in the States and union territories of India, Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Ayodhya, also known as Sāketa, Saketa, is an ancient city of India, the birthplace of Rama and ...
,
Haridwar Haridwar (; ) is a city and municipal corporation in the Haridwar district of Uttarakhand, India. With a population of 228,832 in 2011, it is the second-largest city in the state and the largest in the district. The city is situated on the righ ...
and
Prayagraj Allahabad (), officially known as Prayagraj, also known as Ilahabad, is a metropolis in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.The other five cities were: Agra, Kanpur (Cawnpore), Lucknow, Meerut, and Varanasi (Benares). It is the administrat ...
each hold significance.


Meaning

A city can be distinguished from other human settlements by its relatively great size, but also by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can also refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there, and can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than
rural territory Selsoviet ( be, сельсавет, r=sieĺsaviet, tr. ''sieĺsaviet''; rus, сельсовет, p=ˈsʲelʲsɐˈvʲɛt, r=selsovet; uk, сільрада, silrada) is a shortened name for a rural council and for the area governed by such a cou ...
.Kevin A. Lynch, "What Is the Form of a City, and How is It Made?"; in Marzluff et al. (2008), p. 678. "The city may be looked on as a story, a pattern of relations between human groups, a production and distribution space, a field of physical force, a set of linked decisions, or an arena of conflict. Values are embedded in these metaphors: historic continuity, stable equilibrium, productive efficiency, capable decision and management, maximum interaction, or the progress of political struggle. Certain actors become the decisive elements of transformation in each view: political leaders, families and ethnic groups, major investors, the technicians of transport, the decision elite, the revolutionary classes." National
census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...
es use a variety of definitions – invoking factors such as
population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...
,
population density Population density (in agriculture: standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geographical term.Matt RosenberPopul ...
, number of
dwelling In law, a dwelling (also known as a residence or an abode) is a self-contained unit of accommodation used by one or more households as a home - such as a house, apartment, mobile home, houseboat, vehicle, or other "substantial" structure. The ...
s, economic function, and
infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...
– to classify populations as urban. Typical working definitions for small-city populations start at around 100,000 people. Common population definitions for an urban area (city or town) range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most
U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some jurisdictions set no such minima. In the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanently. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a
cathedral A cathedral is a church that contains the '' cathedra'' () of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually specific to those Christian denomination ...
, resulting in some very small cities such as
Wells Wells most commonly refers to: * Wells, Somerset, a cathedral city in Somerset, England * Well, an excavation or structure created in the ground * Wells (name) Wells may also refer to: Places Canada *Wells, British Columbia England * Wells ...
, with a population 12,000 and
St Davids St Davids or St David's ( cy, Tyddewi, ,  "David's house”) is a city and a community (named St Davids and the Cathedral Close) with a cathedral in Pembrokeshire, Wales, lying on the River Alun. It is the resting place of Saint David, W ...
, with a population of 1,841 .) According to the "functional definition", a city is not distinguished by size alone, but also by the role it plays within a larger political context. Cities serve as administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas.Marshall (1989), pp. 14–15. The presence of a literate elite is sometimes included in the definition. A typical city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of
taxation A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal person, legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regiona ...
(food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically
horizontal Horizontal may refer to: *Horizontal plane, in astronomy, geography, geometry and other sciences and contexts *Horizontal coordinate system, in astronomy *Horizontalism, in monetary circuit theory *Horizontalism, in sociology *Horizontal market, ...
relationships in a
tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English language, English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in p ...
or
village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...
accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or through
leadership Leadership, both as a research area and as a practical skill, encompasses the ability of an individual, group or organization to "lead", influence or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations. The word "leadership" often gets view ...
of a chief.) The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work systems such as canal-building, food-distribution, land-ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are often called
civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). Ci ...
s. The ''degree of urbanization'' is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)". This metric was "devised over years by the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
,
OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; french: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, ''OCDE'') is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate e ...
,
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...
and others, and endorsed in March
021 021 is: * in Brazil, the telephone area code for the city of Rio de Janeiro and surrounding cities (Greater Rio de Janeiro) * in China, the telephone area code for the city of Shanghai. * in Indonesia, the area code for the city of Jakarta and su ...
by the
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...
... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison".


Etymology

The word ''city'' and the related ''
civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). Ci ...
'' come from the
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
root ''
civitas In Ancient Rome, the Latin term (; plural ), according to Cicero in the time of the late Roman Republic, was the social body of the , or citizens, united by law (). It is the law that binds them together, giving them responsibilities () on th ...
'', originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member' and eventually coming to correspond with '' urbs'', meaning 'city' in a more physical sense."city, n.", ''Oxford English Dictionary'', June 2014. The Roman ''civitas'' was closely linked with the Greek ''
polis ''Polis'' (, ; grc-gre, πόλις, ), plural ''poleis'' (, , ), literally means "city" in Greek. In Ancient Greece, it originally referred to an administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. Later, it also ...
''—another common root appearing in English words such as ''
metropolis A metropolis () is a large city or conurbation which is a significant economic, political, and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections, commerce, and communications. A big c ...
''. In
toponymic Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of ''wikt:toponym, toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a p ...
terminology, names of individual cities and towns are called ''astionyms'' (from
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
ἄστυ 'city or town' and ὄνομα 'name').


Geography

Urban geography deals both with cities in their larger context and with their internal structure. Cities are estimated to cover about 3% of the land surface of the Earth.


Site

Town siting has varied through history according to natural, technological, economic, and military contexts. Access to water has long been a major factor in city placement and growth, and despite exceptions enabled by the advent of
rail transport Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a p ...
in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river. Urban areas as a rule cannot produce their own food and therefore must develop some
relationship Relationship most often refers to: * Family relations and relatives: consanguinity * Interpersonal relationship, a strong, deep, or close association or acquaintance between two or more people * Correlation and dependence, relationships in mathem ...
with a
hinterland Hinterland is a German word meaning "the land behind" (a city, a port, or similar). Its use in English was first documented by the geographer George Chisholm in his ''Handbook of Commercial Geography'' (1888). Originally the term was associated ...
which sustains them.Kaplan et al. (2004), pp. 155–156. Only in special cases such as
mining town A mining community, also known as a mining town or a mining camp, is a community that houses miners. Mining communities are usually created around a mine or a quarry. Historic mining communities Australia * Ballarat, Victoria * Bendigo, ...
s which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them.Marshall (1989), p. 15. "The mutual interdependence of town and country has one consequence so obvious that it is easily overlooked: at the global scale, cities are generally confined to areas capable of supporting a permanent agricultural population. Moreover, within any area possessing a broadly uniform level of agricultural productivity, there is a rough but definite association between the density of the rural population and the average spacing of cities above any chosen minimum size." Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would in theory favor the creation of market places in optimal mutually reachable locations.


Center

The vast majority of cities have a central area containing buildings with special economic, political, and religious significance. Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos or if fortified as a
citadel A citadel is the core fortified area of a town or city. It may be a castle, fortress, or fortified center. The term is a diminutive of "city", meaning "little city", because it is a smaller part of the city of which it is the defensive core. In ...
. These spaces historically reflect and amplify the city's centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence.Latham et al. (2009), p. 18. "From the simplest forms of exchange, when peasant farmers literally brought their produce from the fields into the densest point of interaction—giving us market towns—the significance of central places to surrounding territories began to be asserted. As cities grew in complexity, the major civic institutions, from seats of government to religious buildings, would also come to dominate these points of convergence. Large central squares or open spaces reflected the importance of collective gatherings in city life, such as Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Zócalo in Mexico City, the Piazza Navonae in Rome and Trafalgar Square in London. Today cities have a city center or
downtown ''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business distric ...
, sometimes coincident with a
central business district A central business district (CBD) is the commercial and business centre of a city. It contains commercial space and offices, and in larger cities will often be described as a financial district. Geographically, it often coincides with the "city ...
.


Public space

Cities typically have public spaces where anyone can go. These include privately owned spaces open to the public as well as forms of public land such as
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
and the commons.
Western philosophy Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ' ...
since the time of the Greek
agora The agora (; grc, ἀγορά, romanized: ', meaning "market" in Modern Greek) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-state's response to accommodate the social and political order of t ...
has considered physical public space as the substrate of the symbolic
public sphere The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning th ...
. Public art adorns (or disfigures) public spaces.
Park A park is an area of natural, semi-natural or planted space set aside for human enjoyment and recreation or for the protection of wildlife or natural habitats. Urban parks are urban green space, green spaces set aside for recreation inside t ...
s and other natural sites within cities provide residents with relief from the hardness and regularity of typical
built environment The term built environment refers to human-made conditions and is often used in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, public health, sociology, and anthropology, among others. These curated spaces provide the setting for human ac ...
s.


Internal structure

Urban structure generally follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. Physical environment generally constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structure may rely on terraces and winding roads. It may be adapted to its means of subsistence (e.g. agriculture or fishing). And it may be set up for optimal defense given the surrounding landscape. Beyond these "geomorphic" features, cities can develop internal patterns, due to natural growth or to city planning. In a radial structure, main roads converge on a central point. This form could evolve from successive growth over a long time, with concentric traces of
town wall A defensive wall is a fortification usually used to protect a city, town or other settlement from potential aggressors. The walls can range from simple palisades or earthworks to extensive military fortifications with towers, bastions and gates ...
s and
citadel A citadel is the core fortified area of a town or city. It may be a castle, fortress, or fortified center. The term is a diminutive of "city", meaning "little city", because it is a smaller part of the city of which it is the defensive core. In ...
s marking older city boundaries. In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by
ring road A ring road (also known as circular road, beltline, beltway, circumferential (high)way, loop, bypass or orbital) is a road or a series of connected roads encircling a town, city, or country. The most common purpose of a ring road is to assist i ...
s moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as
Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
and
Haarlem Haarlem (; predecessor of ''Harlem'' in English) is a city and municipality in the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of North Holland. Haarlem is situated at the northern edge of the Randstad, one of the most populated metropoli ...
are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. In cities such as
Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
, this pattern is still clearly visible. A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the
grid plan In urban planning, the grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogona ...
, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The
Indus Valley civilisation The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also known as the Indus Civilisation was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form 2600 BCE to 1900&n ...
built Mohenjo-Daro,
Harappa Harappa (; Urdu/ pnb, ) is an archaeological site in Punjab, Pakistan, about west of Sahiwal. The Bronze Age Harappan civilisation, now more often called the Indus Valley Civilisation, is named after the site, which takes its name from a mode ...
and other cities on a grid pattern, using ancient principles described by Kautilya, and aligned with the
compass points The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...
.Smith,
Earliest Cities
", in Gmelch & Zenner (2002).
The ancient Greek city of Priene exemplifies a grid plan with specialized districts used across the Hellenistic Mediterranean.


Urban areas

Urban-type settlement extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the city proper in a form of development sometimes described critically as
urban sprawl Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growt ...
. Decentralization and dispersal of city functions (commercial, industrial, residential, cultural, political) has transformed the very meaning of the term and has challenged geographers seeking to classify territories according to an urban-rural binary. Metropolitan areas include
suburbs A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include commercial and mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a larger city/urban area or as a separate ...
and
exurbs An exurb (or alternately: exurban area) is an area outside the typically denser inner suburban area, at the edge of a metropolitan area, which has some economic and commuting connection to the metro area, low housing density, and growth. It sh ...
organized around the needs of commuters, and sometimes
edge cities ''Edge city'' is a term that originated in the United States for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban residential or ru ...
characterized by a degree of economic and political independence. (In the US these are grouped into metropolitan statistical areas for purposes of
demography Demography () is the statistics, statistical study of populations, especially human beings. Demographic analysis examines and measures the dimensions and Population dynamics, dynamics of populations; it can cover whole societies or groups ...
and
marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
.) Some cities are now part of a continuous urban landscape called urban agglomeration,
conurbation A conurbation is a region comprising a number of metropolises, cities, large towns, and other urban areas which through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area. In most ca ...
, or megalopolis (exemplified by the
BosWash BosWash is a name coined by futurist Herman Kahn in a 1967 essay describing a theoretical United States megalopolis extending from the metropolitan area of Boston to that of Washington, D.C.The term ''BosWash'' first appeared in a 1967 publicatio ...
corridor of the
Northeastern United States The Northeastern United States, also referred to as the Northeast, the East Coast, or the American Northeast, is a geographic region of the United States. It is located on the Atlantic coast of North America, with Canada to its north, the Southe ...
.)


History

The cities of
Jericho Jericho ( ; ar, أريحا ; he, יְרִיחוֹ ) is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It is the administrative seat of the Jericho Gove ...
,
Aleppo )), is an adjective which means "white-colored mixed with black". , motto = , image_map = , mapsize = , map_caption = , image_map1 = ...
, Faiyum,
Yerevan Yerevan ( , , hy, Երևան , sometimes spelled Erevan) is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest continuously inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Y ...
,
Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
,
Damascus )), is an adjective which means "spacious". , motto = , image_flag = Flag of Damascus.svg , image_seal = Emblem of Damascus.svg , seal_type = Seal , map_caption = , ...
and
Argos Argos most often refers to: * Argos, Peloponnese, a city in Argolis, Greece ** Ancient Argos, the ancient city * Argos (retailer), a catalogue retailer operating in the United Kingdom and Ireland Argos or ARGOS may also refer to: Businesses * ...
are among those laying claim to the longest continual inhabitation. Cities, characterized by
population density Population density (in agriculture: standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geographical term.Matt RosenberPopul ...
,
symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...
ic function, and
urban planning Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...
, have existed for thousands of years. In the conventional view, civilization and the city both followed from the development of agriculture, which enabled production of surplus food, and thus a social
division of labour The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organisation so that participants may specialise (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with, or acquire specialised capabilities, and ...
(with concomitant
social stratification Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). As ...
) and
trade Trade involves the transfer of goods and services from one person or entity to another, often in exchange for money. Economists refer to a system or network that allows trade as a market. An early form of trade, barter, saw the direct excha ...
. Early cities often featured granaries, sometimes within a temple. A minority viewpoint considers that cities may have arisen without agriculture, due to alternative means of subsistence (fishing), to use as communal seasonal shelters, Fredy Perlman, ''
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan Fredy Perlman (20 August 1934 – 26 July 1985) was an American author, publisher, and activist. His best-known work, ''Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!'', retells the historical rise of state domination through the Hobbesian metaphor of ...
'', Detroit: Black & Red, 1983; p. 16.
to their value as bases for defensive and offensive military organization,Ashworth (1991), pp. 12–13. or to their inherent economic function. Cities played a crucial role in the establishment of political power over an area, and ancient leaders such as
Alexander the Great Alexander III of Macedon ( grc, wikt:Ἀλέξανδρος, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexandros; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the Ancient Greece, ancient Greek kingdom of Maced ...
founded and created them with zeal.


Ancient times

Jericho Jericho ( ; ar, أريحا ; he, יְרִיחוֹ ) is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It is the administrative seat of the Jericho Gove ...
and
Çatalhöyük Çatalhöyük (; also ''Çatal Höyük'' and ''Çatal Hüyük''; from Turkish ''çatal'' "fork" + ''höyük'' "tumulus") is a tell of a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from appr ...
, dated to the
eighth millennium BC Eighth is ordinal form of the number eight. Eighth may refer to: * One eighth, or ⅛, a fraction, one of eight equal parts of a whole * Eighth note (quaver), a musical note played for half the value of a quarter note (crotchet) * Octave, an int ...
, are among the earliest proto-cities known to archaeologists. However, the
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the F ...
n city of
Uruk Uruk, also known as Warka or Warkah, was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia) situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates River on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates east of modern Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.Harm ...
from the mid fourth millennium BC (ancient Iraq) is considered by some to be the first true City, with its name attributed to the
Uruk period The Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BC; also known as Protoliterate period) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, after the Ubaid period and before the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after ...
. In the fourth and third millennium BC, complex civilizations flourished in the river valleys of
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the F ...
,
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
,
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
, and
Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
. Excavations in these areas have found the
ruins Ruins () are the remains of a civilization's architecture. The term refers to formerly intact structures that have fallen into a state of partial or total disrepair over time due to a variety of factors, such as lack of maintenance, deliberate ...
of cities geared variously towards trade, politics, or religion. Some had large, dense populations, but others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations. Among the early Old World cities, Mohenjo-daro of the Indus Valley civilization in present-day
Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...
, existing from about 2600 BC, was one of the largest, with a population of 50,000 or more and a sophisticated sanitation system. China's planned cities were constructed according to sacred principles to act as celestial microcosms. The Ancient Egyptian cities known physically by archaeologists are not extensive. They include (known by their Arab names)
El Lahun El Lahun ( ar, اللاهون ''El Lāhūn,'' alt. Illahun, Lahun, or Kahun (the latter being a neologism coined by archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie) is a workmen's village in Faiyum, Egypt. El Lahun is associated with the Pyramid of ...
, a workers' town associated with the pyramid of
Senusret II Khakheperre Senusret II was the fourth pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt. He ruled from 1897 BC to 1878 BC. His pyramid was constructed at El-Lahun. Senusret II took a great deal of interest in the Faiyum oasis region and began work on an ...
, and the religious city
Amarna Amarna (; ar, العمارنة, al-ʿamārnah) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site containing the remains of what was the capital city of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. The city was established in 1346 BC, built at the direction of the Ph ...
built by
Akhenaten Akhenaten (pronounced ), also spelled Echnaton, Akhenaton, ( egy, ꜣḫ-n-jtn ''ʾŪḫə-nə-yātəy'', , meaning "Effective for the Aten"), was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh reigning or 1351–1334 BC, the tenth ruler of the Eighteenth Dy ...
and abandoned. These sites appear planned in a highly regimented and
stratified Stratification may refer to: Mathematics * Stratification (mathematics), any consistent assignment of numbers to predicate symbols * Data stratification in statistics Earth sciences * Stable and unstable stratification * Stratification, or st ...
fashion, with a minimalistic grid of rooms for the workers and increasingly more elaborate housing available for higher classes. In Mesopotamia, the civilization of
Sumer Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. It is one of the cradles of c ...
, followed by
Assyria Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , romanized: ''māt Aššur''; syc, ܐܬܘܪ, ʾāthor) was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization which existed as a city-state at times controlling regional territories in the indigenous lands of the A ...
and
Babylon ''Bābili(m)'' * sux, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 * arc, 𐡁𐡁𐡋 ''Bāḇel'' * syc, ܒܒܠ ''Bāḇel'' * grc-gre, Βαβυλών ''Babylṓn'' * he, בָּבֶל ''Bāvel'' * peo, 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽𐎢 ''Bābiru'' * elx, 𒀸𒁀𒉿𒇷 ''Babi ...
, gave rise to numerous cities, governed by kings and fostering multiple languages written in
cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sha ...
. The
Phoenicia Phoenicia () was an ancient thalassocratic civilization originating in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenician city-states extended and shrank throughout their histor ...
n trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Cydon, and Byblos to
Carthage Carthage was the capital city of Ancient Carthage, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the classi ...
and
Cádiz Cádiz (, , ) is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the Province of Cádiz, one of eight that make up the autonomous community of Andalusia. Cádiz, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Western Europe, ...
. In the following centuries, independent
city-state A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...
s of
Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...
, especially
Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
, developed the ''
polis ''Polis'' (, ; grc-gre, πόλις, ), plural ''poleis'' (, , ), literally means "city" in Greek. In Ancient Greece, it originally referred to an administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. Later, it also ...
'', an association of male landowning
citizens Citizenship is a "relationship between an individual and a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection". Each state determines the conditions under which it will recognize persons as its citizens, and ...
who collectively constituted the city. The
agora The agora (; grc, ἀγορά, romanized: ', meaning "market" in Modern Greek) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-state's response to accommodate the social and political order of t ...
, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the polis.
Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...
was the first city that surpassed one million inhabitants. Under the authority of its empire, Rome transformed and
founded Founding may refer to: * The formation of a corporation, government, or other organization * The laying of a building's Foundation * The casting of materials in a mold See also * Foundation (disambiguation) * Incorporation (disambiguation) In ...
many cities (''
coloniae A Roman (plural ) was originally a Roman outpost established in conquered territory to secure it. Eventually, however, the term came to denote the highest status of a Roman city. It is also the origin of the modern term ''colony''. Characteri ...
''), and with them brought its principles of urban architecture, design, and society. In the ancient Americas, early urban traditions developed in the
Andes The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S ...
and
Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
. In the Andes, the first urban centers developed in the
Norte Chico civilization Caral-Supe (also known as Caral and Norte Chico) was a complex pre-Columbian-era society that included as many as thirty major population centers in what is now the Caral region of north-central coastal Peru. The civilization flourished betwee ...
, Chavin and Moche cultures, followed by major cities in the
Huari Huari may refer to: *Huari culture, a historical civilization in Peru *Huari (archaeological site), an archaeological site in Peru *Huari, Peru, a town in Peru * Huari District, a district in the Huari Province, Peru * Huari Province, a province in ...
, Chimu and
Inca The Inca Empire (also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire), called ''Tawantinsuyu'' by its subjects, (Quechua for the "Realm of the Four Parts",  "four parts together" ) was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The admin ...
cultures. The Norte Chico civilization included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal
Peru , image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg , image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg , other_symbol = Great Seal of the State , other_symbol_type = Seal (emblem), National seal , national_motto = "Fi ...
. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. Mesoamerica saw the rise of early urbanism in several cultural regions, beginning with the Olmec and spreading to the Preclassic Maya, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, and
Teotihuacan Teotihuacan (Spanish language, Spanish: ''Teotihuacán'') (; ) is an ancient Mesoamerican city located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, which is located in the State of Mexico, northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan is ...
in central Mexico. Later cultures such as the
Aztec The Aztecs () were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different Indigenous peoples of Mexico, ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those g ...
, Andean civilization,
Mayan Mayan most commonly refers to: * Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America * Mayan languages, language family spoken ...
, Mississippians, and Pueblo peoples drew on these earlier urban traditions. Many of their ancient cities continue to be inhabited, including major metropolitan cities such as
Mexico City Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
, in the same location as Tenochtitlan; while ancient continuously inhabited Pueblos are near modern urban areas in
New Mexico ) , population_demonym = New Mexican ( es, Neomexicano, Neomejicano, Nuevo Mexicano) , seat = Santa Fe , LargestCity = Albuquerque , LargestMetro = Tiguex , OfficialLang = None , Languages = English, Spanish ( New Mexican), Navajo, Ker ...
, such as Acoma Pueblo near the
Albuquerque metropolitan area The Albuquerque Metropolitan Statistical Area, sometimes referred to as Tiguex (named after the Southern Tiwa language, Southern Tiwa), is a metropolitan area in central New Mexico centered on the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Albuquerque. The ...
and
Taos Pueblo Taos Pueblo (or Pueblo de Taos) is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos-speaking (Tiwa) Native American tribe of Puebloan people. It lies about north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico. The pueblos are considered to be one of the oldest c ...
near
Taos Taos or TAOS may refer to: Places * Taos, Missouri, a city in Cole County, Missouri, United States * Taos County, New Mexico, United States ** Taos, New Mexico, a city, the county seat of Taos County, New Mexico *** Taos art colony, an art colo ...
; while others like
Lima Lima ( ; ), originally founded as Ciudad de Los Reyes (City of The Kings) is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón River, Chillón, Rímac River, Rímac and Lurín Rivers, in the desert zone of t ...
are located nearby ancient
Peru , image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg , image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg , other_symbol = Great Seal of the State , other_symbol_type = Seal (emblem), National seal , national_motto = "Fi ...
vian sites such as Pachacamac. Jenné-Jeno, located in present-day Mali and dating to the third century BC, lacked monumental architecture and a distinctive elite social class—but nevertheless had specialized production and relations with a hinterland. Pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa. Other early urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 500 AD, include Awdaghust, Kumbi-Saleh the ancient capital of Ghana, and Maranda a center located on a trade route between Egypt and Gao.


Middle Ages

In the remnants of the Roman Empire, cities of late antiquity gained independence but soon lost population and importance. The locus of power in the West shifted to
Constantinople la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya (Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis (" ...
and to the ascendant Islamic civilization with its major cities
Baghdad Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...
,
Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
, and Córdoba. From the 9th through the end of the 12th century,
Constantinople la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya (Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis (" ...
, capital of the
Eastern Roman Empire The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...
, was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, with a population approaching 1 million. The
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
gradually gained control over many cities in the Mediterranean area, including Constantinople in 1453. In the
Holy Roman Empire The Holy Roman Empire was a Polity, political entity in Western Europe, Western, Central Europe, Central, and Southern Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, dissolution i ...
, beginning in the 12th century, free imperial cities such as
Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...
,
Strasbourg Strasbourg (, , ; german: Straßburg ; gsw, label=Bas Rhin Alsatian, Strossburi , gsw, label=Haut Rhin Alsatian, Strossburig ) is the prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est region of eastern France and the official seat of the Eu ...
,
Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...
,
Basel , french: link=no, Bâlois(e), it, Basilese , neighboring_municipalities= Allschwil (BL), Hégenheim (FR-68), Binningen (BL), Birsfelden (BL), Bottmingen (BL), Huningue (FR-68), Münchenstein (BL), Muttenz (BL), Reinach (BL), Riehen (BS ...
, Zurich,
Nijmegen Nijmegen (;; Spanish and it, Nimega. Nijmeegs: ''Nimwèège'' ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole, located on the Waal river close to the German border. It is about 6 ...
became a privileged elite among towns having won self-governance from their local lord or having been granted self-governanace by the emperor and being placed under his immediate protection. By 1480, these cities, as far as still part of the empire, became part of the Imperial Estates governing the empire with the emperor through the Imperial Diet. By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. In Italy
medieval commune Medieval communes in the European Middle Ages had sworn allegiances of mutual defense (both physical defense and of traditional freedoms) among the citizens of a town or city. These took many forms and varied widely in organization and makeup. C ...
s developed into city-states including the
Republic of Venice The Republic of Venice ( vec, Repùblega de Venèsia) or Venetian Republic ( vec, Repùblega Vèneta, links=no), traditionally known as La Serenissima ( en, Most Serene Republic of Venice, italics=yes; vec, Serenìsima Repùblega de Venèsia, ...
and the
Republic of Genoa The Republic of Genoa ( lij, Repúbrica de Zêna ; it, Repubblica di Genova; la, Res Publica Ianuensis) was a medieval and early modern maritime republic from the 11th century to 1797 in Liguria on the northwestern Italian coast. During the Lat ...
. In Northern Europe, cities including Lübeck and
Bruges Bruges ( , nl, Brugge ) is the capital and largest City status in Belgium, city of the Provinces of Belgium, province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium, in the northwest of the country, and the sixth-largest city of the countr ...
formed the
Hanseatic League The Hanseatic League (; gml, Hanse, , ; german: label=Modern German, Deutsche Hanse) was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German to ...
for collective defense and commerce. Their power was later challenged and eclipsed by the Dutch commercial cities of
Ghent Ghent ( nl, Gent ; french: Gand ; traditional English: Gaunt) is a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the East Flanders province, and the third largest in the country, exceeded in ...
,
Ypres Ypres ( , ; nl, Ieper ; vls, Yper; german: Ypern ) is a Belgian city and municipality in the province of West Flanders. Though the Dutch name is the official one, the city's French name is most commonly used in English. The municipality co ...
, and
Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, Osaka, Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan. In the first millennium AD, the Khmer Empire, Khmer capital of Angkor in Cambodia grew into the most extensive Pre-industrial society, preindustrial settlement in the world by area,Evans ''et al.''
A comprehensive archaeological map of the world's largest preindustrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia
, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, 23 August 2007.
Map reveals ancient urban sprawl
", ''BBC News'', 14 August 2007.
covering over 1,000 km2 and possibly supporting up to one million people.


Early modern

In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. Western Europe's larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic trade. However, most towns remained small. During the Spanish colonization of the Americas the old Roman city concept was extensively used. Cities were founded in the middle of the newly conquered territories, and were bound to several laws regarding administration, finances and urbanism.


Industrial age

The Industrial Revolution, growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive
urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly t ...
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 London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
became the capital of a British empire, world empire and cities across the country grew in locations strategic for manufacturing. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the History of rail transport, introduction of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, fueling migration from rural to city areas. Industrialized cities became deadly places to live, due to health problems resulting from overcrowding, occupational hazards of industry, contaminated water and air, History of water supply and sanitation#Modern age, poor sanitation, and communicable diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Factories and slums emerged as regular features of the urban landscape.


Post-industrial age

In the second half of the twentieth century, deindustrialization (or "economic restructuring") in the West led to poverty, homelessness, and urban decay in formerly prosperous cities. America's "Steel Belt" became a "Rust Belt" and cities such as Decline of Detroit, Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana began to Shrinking cities, shrink, contrary to the global trend of massive urban expansion. Such cities have shifted with varying success into the service economy and public-private partnerships, with concomitant gentrification, uneven urban renewal, revitalization efforts, and selective cultural development.Kaplan (2004), pp. 160–165. "Entrepreneurial leadership became manifest through growth coalitions made up of builders, realtors, developers, the media, government actors such as mayors, and dominant corporations. For example, in St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto, and Ralston Purina played prominent roles. The leadership involved cooperation between public and private interests. The results were efforts at downtown revitalization; inner-city gentrification; the transformation of the CBD to advanced service employment; entertainment, museums, and cultural venues; the construction of sports stadiums and sport complexes; and waterfront development." Under the Great Leap Forward and subsequent Five-year plans of China, five-year plans continuing today,
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
has undergone concomitant urbanization in China, urbanization and Chinese industrialization, industrialization and to become the world's leading manufacturing, manufacturer. Amidst these economic changes, high technology and instantaneous telecommunication enable select cities to become centers of the knowledge economy. A new smart city paradigm, supported by institutions such as the RAND Corporation and IBM, is bringing computerized Surveillance issues in smart cities, surveillance, data analysis, and E-governance, governance to bear on cities and city-dwellers. Some companies are building brand new land use planning, masterplanned cities from scratch on greenfield land, greenfield sites.


Urbanization

Urbanization is the process of migration from rural into urban areas, driven by various political, economic, and cultural factors. Until the 18th century, an equilibrium existed between the rural agricultural population and towns featuring Market (place), markets and small-scale manufacturing.William H. Frey & Zachary Zimmer, "Defining the City"; in Paddison (2001). With the British Agricultural Revolution, agricultural and industrial revolution, industrial revolutions urban population began its unprecedented growth, both through migration and through Demographic transition, demographic expansion. In England the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891.Christopher Watson,
Trends in urbanization
",
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Urban Pests
'', ed. K.B. Wildey and William H. Robinson, 1993.
In 1900, 15% of the world population lived in cities. The cultural appeal of cities also plays a role in attracting residents. Urbanization rapidly spread across the Europe and the Americas and since the 1950s has taken hold in Asia and Africa as well. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, reported in 2014 that for the first time more than half of the world population lives in cities.Somini Sengupta,
U.N. Finds Most People Now Live in Cities
"; ''New York Times'', 10 July 2014. Referring to: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division;
World Urbanization Prospects: 2014 Revision
''; New York: United Nations, 2014.
Latin America is the most urban continent, with four-fifths of its population living in cities, including one fifth of the population said to live in shantytowns (favelas, campamento (Chile), poblaciones callampas, etc.). Batam, Indonesia, Mogadishu, Somalia, Xiamen,
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
and Niamey, Niger, are considered among the world's fastest-growing cities, with annual growth rates of 5–8%. In general, the developed country, more developed countries of the "Global North" remain more urbanized than the less developed countries of the "Global South"—but the difference continues to shrink because urbanization is happening faster in the latter group. Asia is home to by far the greatest absolute number of city-dwellers: over two billion and counting. The UN predicts an additional 2.5 billion citydwellers (and 300 million fewer countrydwellers) worldwide by 2050, with 90% of urban population expansion occurring in Asia and Africa. Megacities, cities with population in the multi-millions, have proliferated into the dozens, arising especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Economic globalization fuels the growth of these cities, as new torrents of foreign Financial capital, capital arrange for rapid industrialization, as well as offshoring, relocation of major businesses from Europe and North America, attracting immigrants from near and far. A deep gulf divides rich and poor in these cities, with usually contain a super-wealthy elite living in gated community, gated communities and large masses of people living in substandard housing with inadequate infrastructure and otherwise poor conditions. Cities around the world have expanded physically as they grow in population, with increases in their surface extent, with the creation of high-rise buildings for residential and commercial use, and with development underground. Urbanization can create rapid demand for water resources management, as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of sewage begins to exceed manageable levels.


Government

Local government of cities takes different forms including prominently the municipality (especially local government in England, in England, local government in the United States, in the United States, municipal governance in India, in India, and in other crown colonies, British colonies; legally, the municipal corporation; ''municipio'' in Municipalities of Spain, Spain and Municipalities of Portugal, in Portugal, and, along with ''municipalidad'', in most former parts of the Spanish Empire, Spanish and Portuguese Empire, Portuguese empires) and the ''commune'' (communes in France, in France and Communes of Chile, in Chile; or ''comune'' in Italy). The chief official of the city has the title of mayor. Whatever their true degree of political authority, the mayor typically acts as the figurehead or personification of their city. City governments have authority to make laws governing activity within cities, while its jurisdiction is generally considered conflict of laws, subordinate (in ascending order) to State government, state/provincial, central government, national, and perhaps international law. This hierarchy of law is not enforced rigidly in practice—for example in conflicts between municipal regulations and national principles such as constitutional rights and property rights.Nicholas Blomley, "What Sort of a Legal Space is a City?" in Brighenti (2013), pp. 1–20. "Municipalities, within this frame, are understood as nested within the jurisdictional space of the provinces. Indeed, rather than freestanding legal sites, they are imagined as products (or 'creatures') of the provinces who may bring them into being or dissolve them as they choose. As with the provinces their powers are of a delegated form: they may only exercise jurisdiction over areas that have been expressly identified by enabling legislation. Municipal law may not conflict with provincial law, and may only be exercised within its defined territory. […]
Yet we are [in] danger [of] missing the reach of municipal law: '[e]ven in highly constitutionalized regimes, it has remained possible for municipalities to micro-manage space, time, and activities through police regulations that infringe both on constitutional rights and private property in often extreme ways' (Vaverde 2009: 150). While liberalism fears the encroachments of the state, it seems less worried about those of the municipality. Thus if a national government proposed a statute forbidding public gatherings or sporting events, a revolution would occur. Yet municipalities routinely enact sweeping by-laws directed at open ended (and ill-defined) offences such as loitering and obstruction, requiring permits for protests or requiring residents and homeowners to remove snow from the city's sidewalks."
Legal conflicts and issues arise more frequently in cities than elsewhere due to the bare fact of their greater density. Modern city governments thoroughly regulation, regulate everyday life in many dimensions, including public health, public and personal health, transport, burial, resource use and resource extraction, extraction, recreation, and the nature and use of buildings. Technologies, techniques, and laws governing these areas—developed in cities—have become ubiquitous in many areas. Municipal officials may be appointed from a higher level of government or elected locally.


Municipal services

Cities typically provide municipal services such as education, through school systems; police, policing, through police departments; and firefighting, through fire departments; as well as the city's basic infrastructure. These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion.Bryan D. Jones, Saadia R. Greenbeg, Clifford Kaufman, & Joseph Drew, "Service Delivery Rules and the Distribution of Local Government Services: Three Detroit Bureaucracies"; in Hahn & Levine (1980). "Local government bureaucracies more or less explicitly accept the goal of implementing rational criteria for the delivery of services to citizens, even though compromises may have to be made in the establishment of these criteria. These production oriented criteria often give rise to "service deliver rules", regularized procedures for the delivery of services, which are attempts to codify the productivity goals of urban service bureaucracies. These rules have distinct, definable distributional consequences which often go unrecognized. That is, the decisions of governments to adopt rational service delivery rules can (and usually do) differentially benefit citizens."Robert L. Lineberry, "Mandating Urban Equality: The Distribution of Municipal Public Services"; in Hahn & Levine (1980). See: Shaw, Mississippi, Hawkins v. Town of Shaw (1971). Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, though some services may be operated by a higher level of government, while others may be privately run. Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America's King assassination riots of 1968.


Finance

The traditional basis for municipal finance is local property tax levied on real estate within the city. Local government can also collect revenue for services, or by leasing land that it owns. However, financing municipal services, as well as urban renewal and other development projects, is a perennial problem, which cities address through appeals to higher governments, arrangements with the private sector, and techniques such as privatization (selling services into the private sector), corporatization (formation of quasi-private municipally-owned corporations), and financialization (packaging city assets into tradable financial public contracts and other related rights. This situation has become acute in deindustrialized cities and in cases where businesses and wealthier citizens have moved outside of city limits and therefore beyond the reach of taxation. Cities in search of cash and cash equivalents, ready cash increasingly resort to the municipal bond, essentially a loan with Maturity (finance), interest and a Maturity (finance), repayment date. City governments have also begun to use tax increment financing, in which a development project is financed by loans based on future tax revenues which it is expected to yield.Rachel Weber, "Selling City Futures: The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy"; ''Economic Geography'' 86(3), 2010; . "TIF is an increasingly popular local redevelopment policy that allows municipalities to designate a 'blighted' area for redevelopment and use the expected increase in property (and occasionally sales) taxes there to pay for initial and ongoing redevelopment expenditures, such as land acquisition, demolition, construction, and project financing. Because developers require cash up-front, cities transform promises of future tax revenues into securities that far-flung buyers and sellers exchange through local markets." Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city credit ratings.


Governance

Governance includes government but refers to a wider domain of social control functions implemented by many actors including non-governmental organizations. The impact of globalization and the role of multinational corporations in local governments worldwide, has led to a shift in perspective on urban governance, away from the "urban regime theory" in which a coalition of local interests functionally govern, toward a theory of outside economic control, widely associated in academics with the philosophy of neoliberalism. In the neoliberal model of governance, public utilities are privatization, privatized, industry is deregulation, deregulated, and corporations gain the status of governing actors—as indicated by the power they wield in public-private partnerships and over business improvement districts, and in the expectation of self-regulation through corporate social responsibility. The biggest investors and real estate developers act as the city's de facto urban planners. The related concept of good governance places more emphasis on the state, with the purpose of assessing urban governments for their suitability for development assistance.Gupta, Verrest, and Jaffe, "Theorizing Governance", in Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 31–33. "The concept of good governance itself was developed in the 1980s, primarily to guide donors in development aid (Doonbos 2001:93). It has been used both as a condition for aid and a development goal in its own right. Key terms in definitions of good governance include participation, accountability, transparency, equity, efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, and rule of law (e.g. Ginther and de Waart 1995; UNDP 1997; Woods 1999; Weiss 2000). […] At the urban level, this normative model has been articulated through the idea of good urban governance, promoted by agencies such as UN Habitat. The Colombian city of Bogotá has sometimes been presented as a model city, given its rapid improvements in fiscal responsibility, provision of public services and infrastructure, public behavior, honesty of the administration, and civic pride." The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in the emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations.


Urban planning

Urban planning, the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve Technical aspects of urban planning, certain objectives. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping theories of urban planning, theories as ideals for how plans should be formed. Planning tools, beyond the original design of the city itself, include public capital investment in infrastructure and Land-use planning, land-use controls such as zoning. The continuous process of comprehensive planning involves identifying general objectives as well as collecting data to evaluate progress and inform future decisions. Government is legally the final authority on planning but in practice the process involves both public and private elements. The legal principle of eminent domain is used by government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project.McQuillin (1937/1987), §§1.75–179. "Zoning, a relatively recent development in the administration of local governmental units, concerns itself with the control of the use of land and structures, the size of buildings, and the use-intensity of building sites. Zoning being an exercise of the police power, it must be justified by such considerations as the protection of public health and safety, the preservation of taxable property values, and the enhancement of community welfare. […] Municipal powers to implement and effectuate city plans are usually ample. Among these is the power of eminent domain, which has been used effectively in connection with slum clearance and the rehabilitation of blighted areas. Also available to cities in their implementation of planning objectives are municipal powers of zoning, subdivision control and the regulation of building, housing and sanitation principles." Planning often involves tradeoffs—decisions in which some stand to gain and some to lose—and thus is closely connected to the prevailing political situation. The history of urban planning dates to some of the earliest known cities, especially in the Indus Valley and Mesoamerican civilizations, which built their cities on grids and apparently zoned different areas for different purposes. The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of planned community, planned communities, fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems.


Society


Social structure

Urban sociology, Urban society is typically
stratified Stratification may refer to: Mathematics * Stratification (mathematics), any consistent assignment of numbers to predicate symbols * Data stratification in statistics Earth sciences * Stable and unstable stratification * Stratification, or st ...
. Spatially, cities are formally or informally Geographical segregation, segregated along ethnic, economic and racial lines. People living relatively close together may live, work, and play in separate areas, and associate with different people, forming ethnic enclave, ethnic or lifestyle enclave, lifestyle enclaves or, in areas of concentrated poverty, ghettoes. While in the US and elsewhere poverty became associated with the inner city, in France it has become associated with the ''banlieues'', areas of urban development which surround the city proper. Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, the racially white people, white majority is empirically the most segregated group. Suburbs in the West, and, increasingly, Gated community, gated communities and other forms of "privatopia" around the world, allow local elites to self-segregate into secure and exclusive neighborhoods. Landless urban workers, contrasted with peasants and known as the proletariat, form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In Marxism, Marxist doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably proletarian revolution, revolt against the bourgeoisie as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake in the status quo. The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status as factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the means of production.Mike Davis, "The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos"; ''Social Text'' 22(4), Winter 2004. "Although studies of the so-called urban informal economy have shown myriad secret liaisons with outsourced multinational production systems, the larger fact is that hundreds of millions of new urbanites must further subdivide the peripheral economic niches of personal service, casual labor, street vending, rag picking, begging, and crime.
This outcast proletariat—perhaps 1.5 billion people today, 2.5 billion by 2030—is the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet. By and large, the urban informal working class is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers during booms; to be expelled during busts; then reabsorbed again in the next expansion. On the contrary, this is a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to the global accumulation and the corporate matrix.
It is ontologically both similar and dissimilar to the historical agency described in the ''Communist Manifesto''. Like the traditional working classes, it has radical chains in the sense of having little vested interest in the reproduction of private property. But it is not a socialized collectivity of labor and it lacks significant power to disrupt or seize the means of production. It does possess, however, yet unmeasured powers of subverting urban order."


Economics

Historically, cities rely on rural areas for intensive farming to crop yield, yield surplus crops, in exchange for which they provide money, political administration, manufactured goods, and culture. Urban economics tends to analyze larger agglomerations, stretching beyond city limits, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the local labor market. As hubs of trade cities have long been home to retail commerce and Consumption (economics), consumption through the interface of shopping. In the 20th century, department stores using new techniques of advertising, public relations, decorative arts, decoration, and design, transformed urban shopping areas into fantasy worlds encouraging self-expression and escape through consumerism. In general, the density of cities expedites commerce and facilitates knowledge spillovers, helping people and firms exchange information and generate new ideas.Kent E. Calder & Mariko de Freytas,
Global Political Cities as Actors in Twenty-First Century International Affairs
; "SAIS Review of International Affairs" 29(1), Winter-Spring 2009; . "Beneath state-to-state dealings, a flurry of activity occurs, with interpersonal networks forming policy communities involving embassies, think tanks, academic institutions, lobbying firms, politicians, congressional staff, research centers, NGOs, and intelligence agencies. This interaction at the level of 'technostructure'—heavily oriented toward information gathering and incremental policy modification—is too complex and voluminous to be monitored by top leadership, yet nevertheless often has important implications for policy."
A thicker labor market allows for better skill matching between firms and individuals. Population density enables also sharing of common infrastructure and production facilities, however in very dense cities, increased crowding and waiting times may lead to some negative effects. Although manufacturing fueled the growth of cities, many now rely on a Tertiary sector of the economy, tertiary or service economy. The services in question range from tourism, hospitality industry, hospitality, entertainment, housekeeping, and prostitution to grey-collar work in legal outsourcing, law, financial services, finance, and management, administration. According to a scientific model of cities by professor Geoffrey West, with the doubling of a city's size, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.


Culture and communications

Cities are typically hubs for education and the arts, supporting university, universities, museums, temples, and other cultural institutions. They feature impressive displays of architecture ranging from small to enormous and ornate to Brutalist architecture, brutal; skyscrapers, providing thousands of offices or homes within a small footprint, and visible from miles away, have become iconic urban features. Cultural elites tend to live in cities, bound together by shared cultural capital, and themselves playing some role in governance. By virtue of their status as centers of culture and literacy, cities can be described as the locus of
civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). Ci ...
, human history, and social change. Density makes for effective mass communication and transmission of news, through heralds, printed proclamations, newspapers, and digital media. These communication networks, though still using cities as hubs, penetrate extensively into all populated areas. In the age of rapid communication and transportation, commentators have described urban culture as nearly ubiquitous or as no longer meaningful. Today, a city's promotion of its cultural activities dovetails with place branding and city marketing, public diplomacy techniques used to inform development strategy; to attract businesses, investors, residents, and tourists; and to create a collective identity, shared identity and sense of place within the metropolitan area.Greg Kerr & Jessica Oliver, "Rethinking Place Identities", in Kavaratzis, Warnaby, & Ashworth (2015). Physical inscriptions, Historical marker, plaques, and monuments on display physically transmit a historical context for urban places. Some cities, such as
Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
,
Mecca Mecca (; officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, commonly shortened to Makkah ()) is a city and administrative center of the Mecca Province of Saudi Arabia, and the Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. It is inland from Jeddah on the Red ...
, and
Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...
have indelible religious status and for hundreds of years have attracted pilgrims. Patriotic tourists visit Agra to see the Taj Mahal, or New York City to visit the World Trade Center (2001–present), World Trade Center. Elvis lovers visit Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis to pay their respects at Graceland. Place brands (which include place satisfaction and place loyalty) have great economic value (comparable to the value of commodity brands) because of their influence on the decision-making process of people thinking about doing business in—"purchasing" (the brand of)—a city. Bread and circuses among other forms of cultural appeal, attract and entertain commoner, the masses.Moholy-Nagy (1968), pp. 136–137. "Why do anonymous people—the poor, the underprivileged, the unconnected—frequently prefer life under miserable conditions in tenements to the healthy order and tranquility of small towns or the sanitary subdivisions of semirural developments? The imperial planners and architects knew the answer, which is as valid today as it was 2,000 years ago. Big cities were created as power images of a competitive society, conscious of its achievement potential. Those who came to live in them did so in order to participate and compete on any attainable level. Their aim was to share in public life, and they were willing to pay for this share with personal discomfort. 'Bread and games' was a cry for opportunity and entertainment still ranking foremost among urban objectives. Sports also play a major role in city branding and local Identity (social science), identity formation. Cities go to considerable lengths in competing to host the Olympic Games, which bring global attention and tourism.Stephen V. Ward, "Promoting the Olympic City"; in John R. Gold & Margaret M. Gold, eds., ''Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World's Games'', 1896–2016; London & New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2008/2011; . "All this media exposure, provided it is reasonably positive, influences many tourist decisions at the time of the Games. This tourism impact will focus on, but extend beyond, the city to the country and the wider global region. More importantly, there is also huge long term potential for both tourism and investment (Kasimati, 2003).
No other city marketing opportunity achieves this global exposure. At the same time, provided it is carefully managed at the local level, it also gives a tremendous opportunity to heighten and mobilize the commitment of citizens to their own city. The competitive nature of sport and its unrivalled capacity to be enjoyed as a mass cultural activity gives it many advantages from the marketing point of view (S.V. Ward, 1998, pp. 231–232). In a more subtle way it also becomes a metaphor for the notion of cities having to compete in a global marketplace, a way of reconciling citizens and local institutions to the wider economic realities of the world."


Warfare

Cities play a crucial strategic role in warfare due to their economic, demographic, symbolic, and political centrality. For the same reasons, they are targets in asymmetric warfare. Many cities throughout history were founded under military auspices, a great many have incorporated fortifications, and military principles continue to military urbanism, influence urban design. Indeed, war may have served as the social rationale and economic basis for the very earliest cities.Mumford (1961), pp. 39–46. "As the physical means increased, this one-sided power mythology, sterile, indeed hostile to life, pushed its way into every corner of the urban scene and found, in the ''new'' institution of organized war, its completest expression. […] Thus both the physical form and the institutional life of the city, from the very beginning to the urban implosion, were shaped in no small measure by the irrational and magical purposes of war. From this source sprang the elaborate system of fortifications, with walls, ramparts, towers, canals, ditches, that continued to characterize the chief historic cities, apart from certain special cases—as during the Pax Romana—down to the eighteenth century. […] War brought concentration of social leadership and political power in the hands of a weapons-bearing minority, abetted by a priesthood exercising sacred powers and possessing secret but valuable scientific and magical knowledge." Powers engaged in geopolitics, geopolitical conflict have established fortified settlements as part of military strategies, as in the case of garrison towns, America's Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War, and Israeli settlements in Palestine. While Philippine–American War, occupying the Philippines, the US Army ordered local people concentrated into cities and towns, in order to isolate committed insurgents and battle freely against them in the countryside. During World War II, national governments on occasion declared certain cities open city, open, effectively surrender (military), surrendering them to an advancing enemy in order to avoid damage and bloodshed. Urban warfare proved decisive, however, in the Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet forces repulsed German occupiers, with extreme casualties and destruction. In an era of low-intensity conflict and rapid urbanization, cities have become sites of long-term conflict waged both by foreign occupiers and by local governments against insurgency. Such warfare, known as counterinsurgency, involves techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare as well as close combat, functionally extends modern urban crime prevention, which already uses concepts such as defensible space theory, defensible space. Although capture is the more common objective, warfare has in some cases spelt complete destruction for a city. Mesopotamian Cuneiform script#List of major cuneiform tablet discoveries, tablets and
ruins Ruins () are the remains of a civilization's architecture. The term refers to formerly intact structures that have fallen into a state of partial or total disrepair over time due to a variety of factors, such as lack of maintenance, deliberate ...
attest to such destruction, as does the Latin motto ''Carthago delenda est''. Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and throughout the Cold War, Nuclear strategy, nuclear strategists continued to contemplate the use of "countervalue" targeting: crippling an enemy by annihilating its valuable cities, rather than counterforce, aiming primarily at its military forces.


Climate change


Infrastructure

Urban
infrastructure Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and priv ...
involves various physical networks and spaces necessary for transportation, water use, energy, recreation, and public functions.Joel A. Tarr, "The Evolution of the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries"; in Hanson (1984). Infrastructure carries a high initial cost in fixed capital (pipes, wires, plants, vehicles, etc.) but lower marginal costs and thus positive economies of scale.Wellman & Spiller, "Introduction", in Wellman & Spiller (2012). Because of the higher barriers to entry, these networks have been classified as natural monopoly, natural monopolies, meaning that economic logic favors control of each network by a single organization, public or private. Infrastructure in general (if not every infrastructure project) plays a vital role in a city's capacity for economic activity and expansion, underpinning the very survival of the city's inhabitants, as well as technological, commercial, industrial, and social activities. Structurally, many infrastructure systems take the form of network theory, networks with redundant links and multiple pathways, so that the system as a whole continue to operate even if parts of it fail.Kath Wellman & Frederik Pretorius, "Urban Infrastructure: Productivity, Project Evaluation, and Finance"; in Wellman & Spiller (2012). The particulars of a city's infrastructure systems have historical path dependence because new development must build from what exists already. Megaprojects such as the construction of airports, power plants, and railways require large upfront investments and thus tend to require funding from national government or the private sector. Privatization may also extend to all levels of infrastructure construction and maintenance. Urban infrastructure ideally serves all residents equally but in practice may prove uneven—with, in some cities, clear first-class and second-class alternatives.


Utilities

Public utility, Public utilities (literally, useful things with general availability) include basic and essential infrastructure networks, chiefly concerned with the supply of water, electricity, and telecommunications capability to the populace. Sanitation, necessary for good health in crowded conditions, requires water supply and waste management as well as individual hygiene. Urban water systems include principally a water supply network and a network (Sewerage, sewerage system) for sewage and stormwater. History of water supply and sanitation, Historically, either local governments or private companies have administered urban water supply, with a tendency toward government water supply in the 20th century and a tendency toward private operation at the turn of the twenty-first. The market for private water services is dominated by two French companies, Veolia Water (formerly Vivendi) and Engie (formerly Suez (company, 1997–2008), Suez), said to hold 70% of all water contracts worldwide.Karen Bakker, "Archipelagos and networks: urbanization and water privatization in the South"; ''The Geographical Journal'' 169(4), December 2003; . "The diversity of water supply management systems worldwide—which operate along a continuum between fully public and fully private—bear witness to repeated shifts back and forth between private and public ownership and management of water systems." Modern urban life relies heavily on the energy transmitted through electricity for the operation of electric machines (from household Home appliance, appliances to outline of industrial machinery, industrial machines to now-ubiquitous electronics, electronic systems used in communications, business, and government) and for traffic lights, street lights, and indoor lighting. Cities rely to a lesser extent on hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and natural gas for transportation, heating, and cooking. Telecommunications infrastructure such as telephone lines and coaxial cables also traverse cities, forming dense networks for mass communication, mass and point-to-point (telecommunications), point-to-point communications.


Transportation

Because cities rely on specialization and an economic system based on wage labour, their inhabitants must have the ability to regularly travel between home, work, commerce, and entertainment. Citydwellers travel foot or by wheel on roads and walkways, or use special rapid transit systems based on tunnel, underground, light rail, overground, and Elevated railway, elevated rail. Cities also rely on long-distance transportation (truck, rail transport, rail, and airplane) for economic connections with other cities and rural areas.Tom Hart, "Transport and the City"; in Paddison (2001). Historically, city streets were the domain of horses and their riders and pedestrians, who only sometimes had sidewalks and transit mall, special walking areas reserved for them. In the West, bicycles or (velocipedes), efficient human-powered machines for short- and medium-distance travel, enjoyed a period of popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century before the rise of automobiles. Soon after, they gained a more lasting foothold in Asian and African cities under European influence. In Western cities, industrializing, expanding, and electrification, electrifying public transit systems and especially streetcars enabled urban expansion as new residential neighborhoods sprung up along transit lines and workers rode to and from work downtown.J. Allen Whitt & Glenn Yago, "Corporate Strategies and the Decline of Transit in U.S. Cities"; ''Urban Affairs Quarterly'' 21(1), September 1985. Since the mid-twentieth century, cities have relied heavily on motor vehicle transportation, with major effects of the car on societies, implications for their layout, environment, and aesthetics.Iain Borden, "Automobile Interstices: Driving and the In-Between Spaces of the City"; in Brighenti (2013). (This transformation occurred most dramatically in the US—where corporate and governmental policies favored automobile transport systems—and to a lesser extent in Europe.) The rise of personal cars accompanied the expansion of urban economic areas into much larger
metropolis A metropolis () is a large city or conurbation which is a significant economic, political, and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections, commerce, and communications. A big c ...
es, subsequently creating ubiquitous traffic issues with accompanying construction of new highways, wider streets, and alternative walkways for pedestrians. However, severe traffic jams still occur regularly in cities around the world, as private car ownership and urbanization continue to increase, overwhelming existing urban street networks. The urban Public transport bus service, bus system, the world's most common form of public transport, uses a network of scheduled bus route, routes to move people through the city, alongside cars, on the roads. Economic function itself also became more decentralized as concentration became impractical and employers relocated to more car-friendly locations (including
edge cities ''Edge city'' is a term that originated in the United States for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district, in what had previously been a suburban residential or ru ...
). Some cities have introduced bus rapid transit systems which include exclusive bus lanes and other methods for prioritizing bus traffic over private cars. Many big American cities still operate conventional public transit by rail, as exemplified by the ever-popular New York City Subway system. Rapid transit is widely used in Europe and has increased in Latin America and Asia. Walking and cycling ("non-motorized transport") enjoy increasing favor (more pedestrian zones and bike lanes) in American and Asian urban transportation planning, under the influence of such trends as the healthy city, Healthy Cities movement, the drive for
sustainable development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
, and the idea of a carfree city. Techniques such as road space rationing and road pricing, road use charges have been introduced to limit urban car traffic.


Housing

Housing of residents presents one of the major challenges every city must face. Adequate housing entails not only physical Shelter (building), shelters but also the physical systems necessary to sustain life and economic activity. Owner-occupancy, Home ownership represents status and a modicum of economic security, compared to renting which may consume much of the income of low-wage urban workers. Homelessness, or lack of housing, is a challenge currently faced by millions of people in countries rich and poor.


Ecology

Urban ecosystems, influenced as they are by the density of human buildings and activities, differ considerably from those of their rural surroundings. Anthropogenic buildings and waste, as well as Agriculture, cultivation in gardens, create physical and chemical environments which have no equivalents in wilderness, in some cases enabling exceptional biodiversity. They provide homes not only for immigrant humans but also for introduced species, immigrant plants, bringing about interactions between species which never previously encountered each other. They introduce frequent disturbance (ecology), disturbances (construction, walking) to plant and animal habitats, creating opportunities for Secondary succession, recolonization and thus favoring ecological succession, young ecosystems with r/K selection theory, r-selected species dominant. On the whole, urban ecosystems are less complex and productive than others, due to the diminished absolute amount of biological interactions.S.T.A. Pickett, M.L. Cadenasso, J.M. Grove, C.H. Nilon, R.V. Pouyat, W.C. Zipperer, & R. Costanza, "Urban Ecological Systems: Linking Terrestrial Ecological, Physical, and Socioeconomic Components of Metropolitan Areas"; in Marzluff et al. (2008). Typical urban fauna include insects (especially ants), rodents (mouse, mice, rats), and birds, as well as cats and dogs (domestication, domesticated and feral). Large predators are scarce. Cities generate considerable
ecological footprint The ecological footprint is a method promoted by the Global Footprint Network to measure human demand on natural capital, i.e. the quantity of nature it takes to support people or an economy. It tracks this demand through an ecological accounti ...
s, locally and at longer distances, due to concentrated populations and technological activities. From one perspective, cities are not ecologically sustainable due to their resource needs. From another, proper management may be able to ameliorate a city's ill effects. Air pollution arises from various forms of combustion, including fireplaces, wood or coal-burning stoves, other heating systems, and internal combustion engines. Industrialized cities, and today third-world megacities, are notorious for veils of smog (industrial haze) which envelop them, posing a chronic threat to the health of their millions of inhabitants.Peter Adey, "Coming up for Air: Comfort, Conflict and the Air of the Megacity"; in Brighenti (2013), p. 103. Urban soil contains higher concentrations of heavy metals (especially lead, copper, and nickel) and has lower pH than soil in comparable wilderness. Modern cities are known for creating their own microclimates, due to concrete, asphalt, and other artificial surfaces, which heat up in sunlight and channel rainwater into Storm drain, underground ducts. The Geography of New York City#Climate, temperature in New York City exceeds Climate of New York (state), nearby rural temperatures by an average of 2–3 °C and at times 5–10 °C differences have been recorded. This effect varies nonlinearly with population changes (independently of the city's physical size). Aerial particulates increase rainfall by 5–10%. Thus, urban areas experience unique climates, with earlier flowering and later leaf dropping than in nearby countries. Poor and working-class people face disproportionate exposure to environmental risks (known as environmental racism when intersecting also with racial segregation). For example, within the urban microclimate, less-vegetated poor neighborhoods bear more of the heat (but have fewer means of coping with it). One of the main methods of improving the urban ecology is including in the cities more urban green space: parks, gardens, lawns, and trees. These areas improve the health, the well-being of the human, animal, and plant populations of the cities. Well-maintained urban trees can provide many social, ecological, and physical benefits to the residents of the city. A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports journal in 2019 found that people who spent at least two hours per week in nature were 23 percent more likely to be satisfied with their life and were 59 percent more likely to be in good health than those who had zero exposure. The study used data from almost 20,000 people in the UK. Benefits increased for up to 300 minutes of exposure. The benefits applied to men and women of all ages, as well as across different ethnicities, socioeconomic status, and even those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. People who did not get at least two hours – even if they surpassed an hour per week – did not get the benefits. The study is the latest addition to a compelling body of evidence for the health benefits of nature. Many doctors already give nature prescriptions to their patients. The study didn't count time spent in a person's own yard or garden as time in nature, but the majority of nature visits in the study took place within two miles from home. "Even visiting local urban green spaces seems to be a good thing," Dr. White said in a press release. "Two hours a week is hopefully a realistic target for many people, especially given that it can be spread over an entire week to get the benefit."


World city system

As the world becomes more closely linked through economics, politics, technology, and culture (a process called
globalization Globalization, or globalisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term ''globalization'' first appeared in the early 20t ...
), cities have come to play a leading role in transnational affairs, exceeding the limitations of international relations conducted by national governments.Gupta et al. (2015), 5–11. "Current globalization, characterized by hyper capitalism and technological revolutions, is understood as the growing intensity of economic, demographic, social, political, cultural and environmental interactions worldwide, leading to increasing interdependence and homogenization of ideologies, production and consumption patterns and lifestyles (Pieterse 1994; Sassen 1998). […] Decentralization processes have increased city-level capacities of city authorities to develop and implement local social and developmental policies. Cities as homes of the rich, and of powerful businesses, banks, stock markets, UN agencies and NGOs, are the location from which global to local decision-making occurs (e.g. New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, São Paulo)." This phenomenon, resurgent today, can be traced back to the Silk Road,
Phoenicia Phoenicia () was an ancient thalassocratic civilization originating in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenician city-states extended and shrank throughout their histor ...
, and the Greek city-states, through the
Hanseatic League The Hanseatic League (; gml, Hanse, , ; german: label=Modern German, Deutsche Hanse) was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German to ...
and other alliances of cities. Today the information economy based on high-speed internet infrastructure enables instantaneous telecommunication around the world, effectively eliminating the distance between cities for the purposes of the international markets and other high-level elements of the world economy, as well as personal communications and mass media.


Global city

A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets. Saskia Sassen used the term "global city" in her 1991 work, ''The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo'' to refer to a city's Power (social and political), power, status, and cosmopolitanism, rather than to its size. Following this view of cities, it is possible to Global city#GaWC study, rank the world's cities hierarchically.John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff, "World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action," ''International Journal of Urban and Regional Research'', 6, no. 3 (1982): 319 Global cities form the capstone of the global hierarchy, exerting command and control through their economic and political influence. Global cities may have reached their status due to early transition to post-industrial society, post-industrialism or through inertia which has enabled them to maintain their dominance from the industrial era. This type of ranking exemplifies an emerging discourse in which cities, considered variations on the same ideal type, ''must'' compete with each other globally to achieve prosperity. Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power and interchange. The term "global city" is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. Paul James (academic), Paul James, for example argues that the term is "reductive and skewed" in its focus on financial systems. Multinational corporations and banks make their headquarters in global cities and conduct much of their business within this context. American firms dominate the international markets for law firm, law and engineering and maintain branches in the biggest foreign global cities. Global cities feature concentrations of extremely wealthy and extremely poor people. Their economies are lubricated by their capacity (limited by the national government's immigration policy, which functionally defines the supply side of the labor market) to recruit low- and high-skilled immigrant workers from poorer areas. More and more cities today draw on this globally available labor force.


Transnational activity

Cities increasingly participate in world political activities independently of their enclosing nation-states. Early examples of this phenomenon are the sister city relationship and the promotion of multi-level governance within the European Union as a technique for European integration.Herrschel & Newman (2017), pp. 3–4. "Instead, the picture is becoming more detailed and differentiated, with a growing number of sub-national entities, cities, city-regions and regions, becoming more visible in their own right, either individually, or collectively as networks, by, more or less tentatively, stepping out of the territorial canvas and hierarchical institutional hegemony of the state. Prominent and well-known cities, and those regions with a strong sense of identity and often a quest for more autonomy, have been the most enthusiastic, as they began to be represented beyond state borders by high-profile city mayors and some regional leaders with political courage and agency. […] This, then, became part of the much bigger political project of the European Union (EU), which has offered a particularly supportive environment for international engagement by—and among—subnational governments as part of its inherent integrationist agenda." Cities including Hamburg, Prague,
Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...
, The Hague, and City of London maintain their own embassies to Brussels and the European Union, the European Union at Brussels. New urban dwellers are increasingly transmigrants, keeping one foot each (through telecommunications if not travel) in their old and their new homes.


Global governance

Cities participate in global governance by various means including membership in global networks which transmit norms and regulations. At the general, global level, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is a significant umbrella organization for cities; regionally and nationally, Eurocities, Asian Network of Major Cities 21, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities the National League of Cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors play similar roles.Sofie Bouteligier,
Inequality in new global governance arrangements: the North–South divide in transnational municipal networks
"; ''Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research'' 26(3), 2013; . "City networks are not a new phenomenon, but it was the 1990s that saw an explosion of such initiatives, especially in the environmental domain. This is mostly ascribed to (chapter 28 of) Agenda 21, which recognizes the role of local authorities in the promotion of sustainable development and stimulates exchange and cooperation between them."
Herrschel & Newman (2017), p. 82. UCLG took responsibility for creating Agenda 21 for culture, a program for cultural policy, cultural policies promoting sustainable development, and has organized various conferences and reports for its furtherance.Nancy Duxbury & Sharon Jeannotte,
Global Cultural Governance Policy
"; Chapter 21 in ''The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture''; London: Ashgate, 2013.
Networks have become especially prevalent in the arena of environmentalism and specifically climate change following the adoption of Agenda 21. Environmental city networks include the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, World Association of Major Metropolises ("Metropolis"), the United Nations Global Compact#UN Global Compact – Cities Programme, United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA), the Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors, ICLEI, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the Transition town, Transition Towns network. Cities with world political status as meeting places for advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, lobbyists, educational institutions, intelligence agencies, military contractors, information technology firms, and other groups with a stake in world policymaking. They are consequently also sites for symbolic protest.


United Nations System

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. * The Habitat I conference in 1976 adopted the "Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements" which identifies urban management as a fundamental aspect of economic development, development and establishes various principles for maintaining urban habitats. * Citing the Vancouver Declaration, the UN General Assembly in December 1977 authorized the United Nations Commission Human Settlements and the HABITAT Centre for Human Settlements, intended to coordinate UN activities related to housing and settlements.Peter R. Walker, "Human Settlements and Urban Life: A United Nations Perspective"; ''Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless'' 14, 2005; . * The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro resulted in a set of international agreements including Agenda 21 which establishes principles and plans for
sustainable development Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
. * The Habitat II conference in 1996 called for cities to play a leading role in this program, which subsequently advanced the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. * In January 2002 the UN Commission on Human Settlements became an umbrella agency called the United Nations Human Settlements Programme or UN-Habitat, a member of the United Nations Development Group. * The Habitat III conference of 2016 focused on implementing these goals under the banner of a "New Urban Agenda". The four mechanisms envisioned for effecting the New Urban Agenda are (1) national policies promoting integrated sustainable development, (2) stronger urban governance, (3) long-term integrated urban and territorial planning, and (4) effective financing frameworks. Just before this conference, the European Union concurrently approved an "Urban Agenda for the European Union" known as the Pact of Amsterdam.Vanessa Watson, "Locating planning in the New Urban Agenda of the urban sustainable development goal"; ''Planning Theory'' 15(4), 2016; . UN-Habitat coordinates the UN urban agenda, working with the UN Environmental Programme, the UN Development Programme, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and the
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...
. The
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...
, a United Nations List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency, has been a primary force in promoting the Habitat conferences, and since the first Habitat conference has used their declarations as a framework for issuing loans for urban infrastructure.Susan Parnell, "Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda"; ''World Development'' 78, 2015; ; pp. 531–532: "Garnered by its interest in the urban poor the Bank, along with other international donors, became an active and influential participant in the Habitat deliberations, confirming both Habitat I and Habitat II's focus on 'development in cities' instead of the role of 'cities in development'." The bank's structural adjustment programs contributed to urbanization in the Third World by creating incentives to move to cities. The World Bank and UN-Habitat in 1999 jointly established the Cities Alliance (based at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.) to guide policymaking, knowledge sharing, and Grant (money), grant distribution around the issue of urban poverty. (UN-Habitat plays an advisory role in evaluating the quality of a locality's governance.) The Bank's policies have tended to focus on bolstering real estate markets through credit and technical assistance. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO has increasingly focused on cities as key sites for influencing cultural governance. It has developed various city networks including the International Coalition of Cities against Racism and the Creative Cities Network. UNESCO's capacity to select World Heritage Sites gives the organization significant influence over cultural capital, tourism, and historic preservation funding.


Representation in culture

Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by
Babylon ''Bābili(m)'' * sux, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 * arc, 𐡁𐡁𐡋 ''Bāḇel'' * syc, ܒܒܠ ''Bāḇel'' * grc-gre, Βαβυλών ''Babylṓn'' * he, בָּבֶל ''Bāvel'' * peo, 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽𐎢 ''Bābiru'' * elx, 𒀸𒁀𒉿𒇷 ''Babi ...
and
Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
. Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. In Sumerian mythology Gilgamesh built the walls of
Uruk Uruk, also known as Warka or Warkah, was an ancient city of Sumer (and later of Babylonia) situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates River on the dried-up ancient channel of the Euphrates east of modern Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.Harm ...
. Cities can be perceived in terms of extremes or opposites: at once liberating and oppressive, wealthy and poor, organized and chaotic. The name anti-urbanism refers to various types of ideological opposition to cities, whether because of their culture or their political relationship with Rural area, the country. Such opposition may result from identification of cities with oppression and the ruling elite. This and other political ideologies strongly influence narratives and themes in discourse about cities. In turn, cities symbolize their home societies. Writers, painters, and filmmakers have produced innumerable works of art concerning the urban experience. Classical and medieval literature includes a genre of ''List of literary descriptions of cities (before 1550), descriptiones'' which treat of city features and history. Modern authors such as Charles Dickens and James Joyce are famous for evocative descriptions of their home cities. Fritz Lang conceived the idea for his influential 1927 film ''Metropolis (1927 film), Metropolis'' while visiting Times Square and marveling at the nighttime neon lighting. Other early cinematic representations of cities in the twentieth century generally depicted them as technologically efficient spaces with smoothly functioning systems of automobile transport. By the 1960s, however, traffic congestion began to appear in such films as ''The Fast Lady'' (1962) and ''Playtime'' (1967). Literature, film, and other forms of popular culture have supplied visions of future cities both utopian and dystopian. The prospect of expanding, communicating, and increasingly interdependent world cities has given rise to images such as Nylonkong (New York, London, Hong Kong) and visions of a single world-encompassing ecumenopolis.Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis,
Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow's City
''; Britannica Book of the Year, 1968. Chapter V: Ecumenopolis, the Real City of Man. "Ecumenopolis, which mankind will have built 150 years from now, can be the real city of man because, for the first time in history, man will have one city rather than many cities belonging to different national, racial, religious, or local groups, each ready to protect its own members but also ready to fight those from other cities, large and small, interconnected into a system of cities. Ecumenopolis, the unique city of man, will form a continuous, differentiated, but also unified texture consisting of many cells, the human communities."


See also

* Lists of cities * List of adjectivals and demonyms for cities * Lost city * Metropolis * Compact city * Megacity * Settlement hierarchy * Urbanization * ''''


Notes


References


Bibliography

* Abrahamson, Mark (2004). ''Global Cities''. Oxford University Press. * Ashworth, G.J. ''War and the City''. London & New York: Routledge, 1991. . * * Bridge, Gary, and Sophie Watson, eds. (2000). ''A Companion to the City''. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000/2003. * Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, ed. (2013). ''Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between.'' Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. . * Carter, Harold (1995). ''The Study of Urban Geography''. Fourth edition. London: Arnold. * Curtis, Simon (2016). ''Global Cities and Global Order''. Oxford University Press. * Jacques Ellul, Ellul, Jacques (1970). ''The Meaning of the City''. Translated by Dennis Pardee. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970. ; French original (written earlier, published later as): :fr:Sans feu ni lieu : Signification biblique de la Grande Ville, Sans feu ni lieu : Signification biblique de la Grande Ville; Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Republished 2003 with * Gupta, Joyetta, Karin Pfeffer, Hebe Verrest, & Mirjam Ros-Tonen, eds. (2015). ''Geographies of Urban Governance: Advanced Theories, Methods and Practices''. Springer, 2015. . * Hahn, Harlan, & Charles Levine (1980). ''Urban Politics: Past, Present, & Future''. New York & London: Longman. * Hanson, Royce (ed.).
Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure
'. Committee on National Urban Policy, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council. Washington: National Academy Press, 1984. * Herrschel, Tassilo & Peter Newman (2017). ''Cities as International Actors: Urban and Regional Governance Beyond the Nation State''. Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature). * * Grava, Sigurd (2003). ''Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Communities''. McGraw Hill, e-book. * * Kaplan, David H.; James O. Wheeler; Steven R. Holloway; & Thomas W. Hodler, cartographer (2004). ''Urban Geography''. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. * Kavaratzis, Mihalis, Gary Warnaby, & Gregory J. Ashworth, eds. (2015). ''Rethinking Place Branding: Comprehensive Brand Development for Cities and Regions''. Springer. . * Kraas, Frauke, Surinder Aggarwal, Martin Coy, & Günter Mertins, eds. (2014). ''Megacities: Our Global Urban Future''. United Nations "International Year of Planet Earth" book series. Springer. . * Latham, Alan, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara, & Donald McNeil (2009). ''Key Concepts in Urban Geography''. London: SAGE. . * Leach, William (1993). ''Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture''. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1994. . * Levy, John M. (2017). ''Contemporary Urban Planning''. 11th Edition. New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis). * Magnusson, Warren. ''Politics of Urbanism: Seeing like a city''. London & New York: Routledge, 2011. . * Marshall, John U. (1989). ''The Structure of Urban Systems''. University of Toronto Press. . * Marzluff, John M., Eric Schulenberger, Wilfried Endlicher, Marina Alberti, Gordon Bradley, Clre Ryan, Craig ZumBrunne, & Ute Simon (2008). ''Urban Ecology: An International Perspective on the Interaction Between Humans and Nature''. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. . * McQuillan, Eugene (1937/1987). ''The Law of Municipal Corporations: Third Edition.'' 1987 revised volume by Charles R.P. Keating, Esq. Wilmette, Illinois: Callaghan & Company. * Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (1968). ''Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment.'' New York: Frederick A Praeger. * Lewis Mumford, Mumford, Lewis (1961). ''The City in History, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects''. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. * * * Paddison, Ronan, ed. (2001). ''Handbook of Urban Studies''. London; Thousand Oaks, California; and New Delhi: SAGE Publications. . * * Witold Rybczynski, Rybczynski, W., ''City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World'', (1995) * Smith, Michael E. (2002
''The Earliest Cities. In Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology, edited by George Gmelch and Walter Zenner''
pp. 3–19. 4th ed. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL. * Aidan Southall, Southall, Aidan (1998). ''The City in Time and Space''. Cambridge University Press. * Wellman, Kath & Marcus Spiller, eds. (2012). ''Urban Infrastructure: Finance and Management''. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. .


Further reading

* Berger, Alan S.
''The City: Urban Communities and Their Problems''
Dubuque, Iowa : William C. Brown, 1978. * Chandler, T. ''Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census''. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987. * Patrick Geddes, Geddes, Patrick, ''City Development'' (1904) * * Kemp, Roger L. '' Managing America's Cities: A Handbook for Local Government Productivity'', McFarland and Company, Inc., Publisher, Jefferson, North Carolina and London, 2007. (). * Kemp, Roger L. ''How American Governments Work: A Handbook of City, County, Regional, State, and Federal Operations'', McFarland and Company, Inc., Publisher, Jefferson, North Carolina and London. (). * Kemp, Roger L. "City and Gown Relations: A Handbook of Best Practices," McFarland and Company, Inc., Publisher, Jefferson, North Carolina, US, and London, (2013). (). * Monti, Daniel J. Jr., ''The American City: A Social and Cultural History''. Oxford, England and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 391 pp. . * Reader, John (2005) Cities. Vintage, New York. * Robson, W.A., and Regan, D.E., ed., ''Great Cities of the World'', (3d ed., 2 vol., 1972) * Smethurst, Paul (2015). ''The Bicycle – Towards a Global History''. Palgrave Macmillan. . * Thernstrom, S., and Sennett, R., ed., ''Nineteenth-Century Cities'' (1969) * Arnold J. Toynbee, Toynbee, Arnold J. (ed), ''Cities of Destiny'', New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Pan historical/geographical essays, many images. Starts with "Athens", ends with "The Coming World City-Ecumenopolis". * Max Weber, Weber, Max, ''The City (Weber book), The City'', 1921. (tr. 1958)


External links


World Urbanization Prospects
Website of the United Nations Population Division *
Urban population (% of total)
– World Bank website based on UN data.
Degree of urbanization (percentage of urban population in total population) by continent in 2016
– Statista, based on Population Reference Bureau data. * * {{Authority control City, Cities Urban geography Populated places by type Types of populated places