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Further information: Historical cities and List of largest cities throughout history The Round city of Baghdad, the capital of Iraq Extent and major sites of the Indus Valley Civilization of ancient India Towns and cities have a long history, although opinions vary on whether any particular ancient settlement can be considered a city. A city formed as central places of trade for the benefit of the members living in close proximity to others facilitates interaction of all kinds. These interactions generate both positive and negative externalities between others' actions. Benefits include reduced transport costs, exchange of ideas, sharing of natural resources, large local markets, and later in their development, amenities such as running water and sewage disposal. Possible costs would include higher rate of crime, higher mortality rates, higher cost of living, worse pollution, traffic and high commuting times. Cities grow when the benefits of proximity between people and firms are higher than the cost. The first true towns are sometimes considered large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power were centralized. In 1950 Gordon Childe attempted to define a historic city with 10 general metrics.[7] These are: Size and density of the population should be above normal. Differentiation of the population. Not all residents grow their own food, leading to specialists. Payment of taxes to a deity or king. Monumental public buildings. Those not producing their own food are supported by the king. Systems of recording and practical science. A system of writing. Development of symbolic art. Trade and import of raw materials. Specialist craftsmen from outside the kin-group. This categorisation is descriptive, and it is used as a general touchstone when considering ancient cities, although not all have each of its characteristics. One characteristic that can be used to distinguish a small city from a large town is organized government. A town accomplishes common goals through informal agreements between neighbors or the leadership of a chief. A city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to feed the government workers. The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work projects (such as canal building), food distribution, land ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of those. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations. Mohenjo-daro, a World Heritage site that was part of the Indus Valley Civilization Ancient times Further information: Cities of the Ancient Near East, Polis, and City-state Ancient Ur of Sumer in present day Tell el-Mukayyar in Iraq, one of the world's earliest сities View of the Agora of Athens with the temple of Hephaestus to the left and the Stoa of Attalos to the right Scale model of ancient Rome, 3rd century AD A model of native American pyramids in the Zócalo in the center of Mexico City Daily life of people from the Song period at the capital, Bianjing, today's Kaifeng Constantinople, the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the 9th through the 12th century Early cities developed in a number of regions of the ancient world. Uruk is the world's first city.[8] After Mesopotamia, this culture arose in Syria and Anatolia, as shown by the city of Çatalhöyük (7500–5700BC). It is the largest Neolithic site found to date.[citation needed] Although it has sometimes been claimed[citation needed] that ancient Egypt lacked urbanism, several types of urban settlements were found in ancient times. The Indus Valley Civilization and ancient China are two other areas with major indigenous urban traditions. Among the early Old World cities, Mohenjo-daro of the Indus Valley Civilization in present-day Pakistan, existing from about 2600 BC, was one of the largest, with a population of 50,000 or more.[9] In ancient Greece, beginning in the early 1st millennium BC, there emerged independent city-states that evolved for the first time the notion of citizenship, becoming in the process the archetype of the free city, the polis.[10] The Agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the polis.[11] These Greek city-states reached great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy, and nurtured in Athens under a democratic government. The Greek Hippodamus of Miletus (c. 407 BC) has been dubbed the "Father of City Planning" for his design of Miletus; the Hippodamian, or grid plan, was the basis for subsequent Greek and Roman cities.[12] In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great commissioned Dinocrates of Rhodes to lay out his new city of Alexandria, the grandest example of idealized urban planning of the ancient Mediterranean world, where the city's regularity was facilitated by its level site near a mouth of the Nile. This roster of early urban traditions is notable for its diversity. Excavations at early urban sites show that some cities were sparsely populated political capitals, others were trade centers, and still other cities had a primarily religious focus. Some cities had large dense populations, whereas others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations. Theories that attempt to explain ancient urbanism by a single factor, such as economic benefit, fail to capture the range of variation documented by archaeologists.[13] The growth of the population of ancient civilizations, the formation of ancient empires concentrating political power, and the growth in commerce and manufacturing led to ever greater capital cities and centres of commerce and industry, with Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia of the Hellenistic civilization, Pataliputra (now Patna) in India, Chang'an (now Xi'an) in China, Carthage, ancient Rome, its eastern successor Constantinople (later Istanbul). Keith Hopkins estimates that ancient Rome had a population of about a million people by the end of the 1st century BC,[14] after growing continually during the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st centuries BC, making it the largest city in the world at the time.[15] Alexandria's population was also close to Rome's population at around the same time, the historian Rostovtzeff estimates a total population close to a million based on a census dated from 32 AD that counted 180,000 adult male citizens in Alexandria.[16] Cities of Late Antiquity underwent transformations as the urban power base shrank and was transferred to the local bishop (see Late Roman Empire). Cities essentially disappeared, earliest in Roman Britain and Germania and latest in the Eastern Roman Empire and Visigothic Spain.[citation needed] In the ancient Americas, early urban traditions developed in the Andes and Mesoamerica. In the Andes, the first urban centers developed in the Norte Chico civilization (also Caral or Caral-Supe civilization), Chavin and Moche cultures, followed by major cities in the Huari, Chimu and Inca 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. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas, flourishing between the 30th century BC and the 18th century BC.[17] Mesoamerica saw the rise of early urbanism in several cultural regions, including the Preclassic Maya, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, and Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Later cultures such as the Aztec drew on these earlier urban traditions. In the first millennium AD, an urban tradition developed in the Khmer region of Cambodia, where Angkor grew into one of the largest cities (in area) of the world.[18] The closest rival to Angkor, the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, was between 100 and 150 square kilometres (39 and 58 sq mi) in total size.[19] Although its population remains a topic of research and debate, newly identified agricultural systems in the Angkor area may have supported up to one million people.[20] Agriculture was practiced in sub-Saharan Africa since the third millennium BC. Because of this, cities could develop as centers of non-agricultural activity. Exactly when this first happened is still a topic of archeological and historical investigation. Western scholarship has tended to focus on cities in Europe and Mesopotamia, but emerging archeological evidence indicates that urbanization occurred south of the Sahara well before the influence of Arab urban culture. One of the oldest sites documented thus far, Jenné-Jeno in what is today Mali, has in fact been dated back to the third century BC. According to Roderick and Susan McIntosh, Jenné-Jeno did not fit into traditional Western conceptions of urbanity as it lacked monumental architecture and a distinctive elite social class, but it should indeed be considered a city based on more a more functional redefinition of urban development. In particular, Jenné-Jeno featured settlement mounds arranged according to a horizontal, rather than vertical, power hierarchy, and served as a center of specialized production and exhibited functional interdependence with the surrounding hinterland.[21] Archaeological evidence from Jenné-Jeno, specifically the presence of non-West African glass beads dated from the third century BC to the fourth century AD, indicates that pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa.[22] Additionally, 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 rout between Egypt and Gao.[23] Middle Ages This woodcut shows Nuremberg as a prototype of a flourishing and independent city in the 15th century Bardejov in Slovakia - an example of a well-preserved medieval city. The building in the centre is a city hall. While David Kessler and Peter Temin consider ancient Rome the largest city before the 19th century, London was the first to exceed a population of 1 million.[24] George Modelski considers medieval Baghdad, with an estimated population of 1.2 million at its peak, the largest city before 19th century London and the first with a population of over one million.[25] Others estimate that Baghdad's population may have been as large as 2 million in the 9th century.[26] From the 9th through the end of the 12th century, the city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, with a population approaching 1 million.[27][28] During the European Middle Ages, a town was as much a political entity as a collection of houses. City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community: "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own were not unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another than for surrounding land. In the Holy Roman Empire, some cities had no other lord than the emperor. In Italy medieval communes had quite a statelike power. In exceptional cases like Venice, Genoa or Lübeck, cities themselves became powerful states, sometimes taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan. Early modern Gdańsk in the 17th century While the city-states, or poleis, of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea languished from the 16th century, Europe's larger capitals benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. By the early 19th century, London had become the largest city in the world with a population of over a million, while Paris rivaled the well-developed regionally traditional capital cities of Baghdad, Beijing, Istanbul and Kyoto. 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 about administration, finances and urbanism. Most towns remained far smaller, so that in 1500 only some two dozen places in the world contained more than 100,000 inhabitants. As late as 1700, there were fewer than forty, a figure that rose to 300 in 1900. A small city of the early modern period might contain as few as 10,000 inhabitants, a town far fewer.[citation needed] Industrial age Glasgow slum in 1871 The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the invention of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, thus allowing migration from rural to city areas. However, cities during those periods of time were deadly places to live in, due to health problems resulting from contaminated water and air, and communicable diseases. In the Great Depression of the 1930s cities were hard hit by unemployment, especially those with a base in heavy industry. In the U.S. urbanization rate increased forty to eighty percent during 1900–1990. Today the world's population is slightly over half urban,[29] with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. |
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