U.S. states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants.[13][14] Some jurisdictions set no such minima.[15] In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanent. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a cathedral, resulting in some very small cities such as Wells, with a population of 12,000 as of 2018[update], and St Davids, with a population of 1,841 as of 2011[update].) 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.[16][17]
The presence of a literate elite is often associated with cities because of the cultural diversities present in a city.
taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically horizontal relationships in a tribe or village accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or the leadership 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 civilizations
.
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)".[20] This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March [2021] by the United Nations ... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison".[21]
Etymology
The word city and the related civilization come from the Latin root civitas, originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member' and eventually coming to correspond with urbs, meaning 'city' in a more physical sense.[10] The Roman civitas was closely linked with the Greek polis—another common root appearing in English words such as metropolis.[22]
In
toponymic terminology, names of individual cities and towns are called astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'city or town' and ὄνομα 'name').[23]
Urban geography deals both with cities in their larger context and with their internal structure.[24] Cities are estimated to cover about 3% of the land surface of the Earth.[25]
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 in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river.[26]
Urban areas as a rule cannot
mining towns which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them.[28] Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would, in theory, favor the creation of marketplaces in optimal mutually reachable locations.[29]
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
Urban green spaces are another component of public space that provides the benefit of mitigating the urban heat island effect, especially in cities that are in warmer climates. These spaces prevent carbon imbalances, extreme habitat losses, electricity and water consumption, and human health risks.[33]
Internal structure
The L'Enfant Plan for Washington, D.C. combines a utilitarian grid pattern with diagonal avenues and a symbolic focus on monumental architecture.[34]
The urban structure generally follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. The physical environment generally constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structures 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.[35] 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 walls and citadels marking older city boundaries. In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by ring roads moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. In cities such as Moscow
, this pattern is still clearly visible.
A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the
Aerial view of the Gush Dan metropolitan area in Israel, showing the geometrically planned[39] city of Tel Aviv (upper left), Givatayim to the east, and some of Bat Yam to the south.[40]
The urban-type settlement extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the city proper[41] in a form of development sometimes described critically as urban sprawl.[42] 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.[14]
Cities, characterized by population density, symbolic function, and urban planning, have existed for thousands of years.[44] In the conventional view, civilization and the city were both followed by the development of agriculture, which enabled the production of surplus food and thus a social division of labor (with concomitant social stratification) and trade.[45][46] Early cities often featured granaries, sometimes within a temple.[47] A minority viewpoint considers that cities may have arisen without agriculture, due to alternative means of subsistence (fishing),[48] to use as communal seasonal shelters,[49] to their value as bases for defensive and offensive military organization,[50][51] or to their inherent economic function.[52][53][54] Cities played a crucial role in the establishment of political power over an area, and ancient leaders such as Alexander the Great founded and created them with zeal.[55]
, the first city in the world to reach one million inhabitants
proto-cities known to archaeologists.[49][56] However, the Mesopotamian city of Uruk from the mid-fourth millennium BC (ancient Iraq) is considered by most archaeologists to be the first true city, innovating many characteristics for cities to follow, with its name attributed to the Uruk period.[57][58][59]
In the
third millennium BC, complex civilizations flourished in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India,[60][61]China,[62] and Egypt. Excavations in these areas have found the ruins 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.
The Ancient Egyptian cities known physically by archaeologists are not extensive.[16] They include (known by their Arab names) El Lahun, a workers' town associated with the pyramid of Senusret II, and the religious city Amarna built by Akhenaten and abandoned. These sites appear planned in a highly regimented and stratified fashion, with a minimalistic grid of rooms for the workers and increasingly more elaborate housing available for higher classes.[65]
In the following centuries, independent city-states of Greece, especially Athens, developed the polis, an association of male landowning citizens who collectively constituted the city.[67] The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of the athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life of the polis.[68]Rome was the first city that surpassed one million inhabitants. Under the authority of its empire, Rome transformed and founded many cities (Colonia), and with them brought its principles of urban architecture, design, and society.[69]
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.[71] Pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa.[72] 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.[73]
A map of Haarlem in the Netherlands, created around 1550, shows the city completely surrounded by a city wall and defensive canal, with its square shape inspired by the shape of Jerusalem
Imperial Estates governing the empire with the emperor through the Imperial Diet.[77]
By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. In Italy,
Sakai
, which enjoyed considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.
In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century.[82][83] Western Europe's larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an 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.
Graph showing urbanization from 1950 projected to 2050.[94]
Map showing urban areas with at least one million inhabitants in 2006
industrial revolutions urban population began its unprecedented growth, both through migration and demographic expansion. In England, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891.[97] In 1900, 15% of the world's population lived in cities.[98] The cultural appeal of cities also plays a role in attracting residents.[99]
Urbanization rapidly spread across 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.[100][b]
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.[96] The UN predicts an additional 2.5 billion city dwellers (and 300 million fewer country dwellers) worldwide by 2050, with 90% of urban population expansion occurring in Asia and Africa.[100][109]
immigrants from near and far.[112] A deep gulf divides the rich and poor in these cities, with usually contain a super-wealthy elite living in gated communities and large masses of people living in substandard housing with inadequate infrastructure and otherwise poor conditions.[113]
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.[114][115]
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.[116]
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.[119]
City governments have the authority to make
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.[121]
Municipal officials may be appointed from a higher level of government or elected locally.[122]
, Ireland, extinguishing a severe fire at a hardware store in 1970
Cities typically provide
school systems; 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.[123][124] Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, but some services may be operated by a higher level of government,[125] while others may be privately run.[126] 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.[127] 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 tradeable 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.[128][129][130][131] Cities in search of ready cash increasingly resort to the municipal bond, essentially a loan with interest and a repayment date.[132] 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.[131] Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city credit ratings.[133]
real estate developers act as the city's de facto urban planners.[136]
The related concept of
development assistance.[137] The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations.[138]
La Plata in Argentina is based on a perfect square with 5196-meter sides, and was designed in the 1880s as the new capital of Buenos Aires Province.[139]
Urban planning, the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve certain objectives. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping 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 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.[140][141]
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 the government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project.[141] 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.[142]
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.[16][143] The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of planned communities, fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems.
Landless urban workers, contrasted with peasants and known as the proletariat, form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In Marxist doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably revolt against the bourgeoisie as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake[clarification needed] in the status quo.[145] The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status of factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the means of production.[146]
In general, the density of cities expedites commerce and facilitates knowledge spillovers, helping people and firms exchange information and generate new ideas.[150][151] 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.[152]
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%.[154]
Culture and communications
Paris is one of the best-known cities in the world.[155]
skyscrapers, providing thousands of offices or homes within a small footprint, and visible from miles away, have become iconic urban features.[156] Cultural elites tend to live in cities, bound together by shared cultural capital, and themselves play some role in governance.[157] By virtue of their status as centers of culture and literacy, cities can be described as the locus of civilization, human history, and social change.[158][159]
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[14][160][161] or as no longer meaningful.[162]
Today, a city's promotion of its cultural activities dovetails with
Elvis lovers visit Memphis to pay their respects at Graceland.[168] 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.[166]
Bread and circuses among other forms of cultural appeal, attract and entertain the masses.[99][169] Sports also play a major role in city branding and local identity formation.[170] Cities go to considerable lengths in competing to host the Olympic Games, which bring global attention and tourism.[171] Paris, a city known for its cultural history, is the site of the next Olympics in the summer of 2024.[172]
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 influence urban design.[173] Indeed, war may have served as the social rationale and economic basis for the very earliest cities.[50][51]
Powers engaged in 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.[174] While occupying the Philippines, the US Army ordered local people to concentrate in cities and towns, in order to isolate committed insurgents and battle freely against them in the countryside.[175][176]
During World War II, national governments on occasion declared certain cities open, effectively 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.[146][177] Such warfare, known as counterinsurgency, involves techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare as well as close combat,[178] and functionally extends modern urban crime prevention, which already uses concepts such as defensible space.[179]
Although capture is the more common objective, warfare has in some cases spelled complete destruction for a city. Mesopotamian
is a large city that has experienced multiple droughts throughout the years, which has led to decreased economic productivity.[194]
Because of the high density and effects like the
aquifer depletion
.
A report by the
improving transportation efficiencies, and greening construction (largely due to cement's outsized role in climate change and improvements in sustainable construction practices and weatherization).In the most recent past, increasing urbanization has also been proposed as a phenomenon that has a reducing effect on the global rate of carbon emission primarily because with urbanization comes technical prowess which can help drive sustainability.[202] Lists of high impact climate change solutions tend to include city-focused solutions; for example, Project Drawdown recommends several major urban investments, including improved bicycle infrastructure,[203] building retrofitting,[204]district heating,[205] public transit,[206] and walkable cities as important solutions.[207]There are many cities that are attempting to reduce the effect of urban heat islands by painting the roads white. Temperatures on the roads with the coat were ~12 F less than roads without in Phoenix.[208]
Because of this, the international community has formed coalitions of cities (such as the
ICLEI) and policy goals, such as Sustainable Development Goal 11 ("sustainable cities and communities"), to activate and focus attention on these solutions. Currently, in 2022, there is a deterioration in the progress of the goal. There is limited progress on making cities and human settlements more appropriate to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Pacific island countries. There is fair progress in Central and Southern Asia and Eastern and South-Eastern Asian. However, it has been achieved in Developed countries.[209]
Urban infrastructure involves various physical networks and spaces necessary for transportation, water use, energy, recreation, and public functions.[210] Infrastructure carries a high initial cost in fixed capital but lower marginal costs and thus positive economies of scale.[211] Because of the higher barriers to entry, these networks have been classified as natural monopolies, meaning that economic logic favors control of each network by a single organization, public or private.[116][212]
Infrastructure in general 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.[210][211] Structurally, many infrastructure systems take the form of networks with redundant links and multiple pathways, so that the system as a whole continue to operate even if parts of it fail.[212] The particulars of a city's infrastructure systems have historical path dependence because new development must build from what exists already.[211]
railways require large upfront investments and thus tend to require funding from the national government or the private sector.[213][212] Privatization may also extend to all levels of infrastructure construction and maintenance.[214]
Urban infrastructure ideally serves all residents equally but in practice may prove uneven—with, in some cities, clear first-class and second-class alternatives.[124][215][116]
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.[216]
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 system) for sewage and stormwater. 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.[116][c] The market for private water services is dominated by two French companies, Veolia Water (formerly Vivendi) and Engie (formerly Suez), said to hold 70% of all water contracts worldwide.[116][218]
Because cities rely on specialization and an economic system based on wage labor, their inhabitants must have the ability to regularly travel between home, work, commerce, and entertainment.[220] City dwellers travel by foot or by wheel on roads and walkways,or use special rapid transit systems based on underground, overground, and elevated rail. Cities also rely on long-distance transportation (truck, rail, and airplane) for economic connections with other cities and rural areas.[221]
City streets historically were the domain of
streetcars enabled urban expansion as new residential neighborhoods sprung up along transit lines and workers rode to and from work downtown.[221][226]
Since the mid-20th century, cities have relied heavily on motor vehicle transportation, with major implications for their layout, environment, and aesthetics.[227] (This transformation occurred most dramatically in the US—where corporate and governmental policies favored automobile transport systems—and to a lesser extent in Europe.)[221][226] The rise of personal cars accompanied the expansion of urban economic areas into much larger metropolises, subsequently creating ubiquitous traffic issues with the accompanying construction of new highways, wider streets, and alternative walkways for pedestrians.[228][229][230][164] 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.[127]
The urban
bus lanes and other methods for prioritizing bus traffic over private cars.[127][232] 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.[127]
The housing of residents presents one of the major challenges every city must face. Adequate housing entails not only physical shelters but also the physical systems necessary to sustain life and economic activity.[235]
Homeownership 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.[236] Because cities generally have higher population densities than rural areas, city dwellers are more likely to reside in apartments and less likely to live in a single-family home.
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 cultivation in gardens, create physical and chemical environments which have no equivalents in the wilderness, in some cases enabling exceptional biodiversity. They provide homes not only for immigrant humans but also for immigrant plants, bringing about interactions between species that never previously encountered each other. They introduce frequent disturbances (construction, walking) to plant and animal habitats, creating opportunities for recolonization and thus favoring young ecosystems with 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.[237][238][239][240]
Typical urban
predators are scarce.[239] However, in North America, large predators such as coyotes and white-tailed deer roam in urban wildlife [241]
Cities generate considerable
sustainable due to their resource needs. From another, proper management may be able to ameliorate a city's ill effects.[242][243]Air pollution arises from various forms of combustion,[244] including fireplaces, wood or coal-burning stoves, other heating systems,[245] and internal combustion engines. Industrialized cities, and today third-world megacities, are notorious for veils of smog (industrial haze) that envelop them, posing a chronic threat to the health of their millions of inhabitants.[246] Urban soil contains higher concentrations of heavy metals (especially lead, copper, and nickel) and has lower pH than soil in the comparable wilderness.[239]
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 underground ducts. The temperature in New York City exceeds 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).[239][247] Aerial particulates increase rainfall by 5–10%. Thus, urban areas experience unique climates, with earlier flowering and later leaf dropping than in nearby countries.[239]
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).[248]
One of the main methods of improving the urban ecology is including in the cities more urban green spaces: parks, gardens, lawns, and trees. These areas improve the health and well-being of the human, animal, and plant populations of the cities.[249] Well-maintained urban trees can provide many social, ecological, and physical benefits to the residents of the city.[250]
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 are applied to men and women of all ages, as well as across different ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, 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 of 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."[251]
World city system
As the world becomes more closely linked through economics, politics, technology, and culture (a process called
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.[257]
Global city
Stock exchanges, characteristic features of the top global cities, are interconnected hubs for capital. Here, a delegation from Australia visits the London Stock Exchange
.
A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets.[258][259]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, status, and cosmopolitanism, rather than to its size.[260] Following this view of cities, it is possible to rank the world's cities hierarchically.[261] 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-industrialism[262] or through inertia which has enabled them to maintain their dominance from the industrial era.[263] 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.[171][164]
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, for example argues that the term is "reductive and skewed" in its focus on financial systems.[264]
Multinational corporations and banks make their headquarters in global cities and conduct much of their business within this context.[265] American firms dominate the international markets for law and engineering and maintain branches in the biggest foreign global cities.[266]
Large cities have a great divide between populations of both ends of the financial spectrum.[267] Regulations on immigration promote the exploitation of low- and high-skilled immigrant workers from poor areas.[268][269][270] During employment, migrant workers may be subject to unfair working conditions, including working overtime, low wages, and lack of safety in workplaces.[271]
transmigrants, keeping one foot each (through telecommunications if not travel) in their old and their new homes.[277]
Global governance
Cities participate in
Agenda 21 for culture, a program for cultural policies promoting sustainable development, and has organized various conferences and reports for its furtherance.[280]
Networks have become especially prevalent in the arena of
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.[151][d] South Africa has one of the highest rate of protests in the world. Pretoria, a city in South Africa had a rally where 5 thousand people took part in order to advocate for increasing wages to afford living costs.[282]
The World Assembly of Mayors at the Habitat III conference in Quito
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 development and establishes various principles for maintaining urban habitats.[283]
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.[284]
The World Bank, a U.N. 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.[286] The bank's structural adjustment programs contributed to urbanization in the Third World by creating incentives to move to cities.[289][290] 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 distribution around the issue of urban poverty.[291] (UN-Habitat plays an advisory role in evaluating the quality of a locality's governance.)[137] The Bank's policies have tended to focus on bolstering real estate markets through credit and technical assistance.[292]
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.[280]
Representation in culture
Further information:
Cities in fiction
The Fall of Babylon, an 1831 portrait by John Martin, depicts chaos with the Persian army occupying Babylon, symbolizing the ruin of a decadent civilization. The lightning striking the Babylonian ziggurat represents the Tower of Babel
and God's judgment against Babylon.
Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by Babylon and Jerusalem.[293]Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. In Sumerian mythology Gilgamesh built the walls of Uruk.
Cities can be perceived in terms of extremes or opposites: at once liberating and oppressive, wealthy and poor, organized and chaotic.[294] The name anti-urbanism refers to various types of ideological opposition to cities, whether because of their culture or their political relationship with the country. Such opposition may result from identification of cities with oppression and the ruling elite.[295] This and other political ideologies strongly influence narratives and themes in discourse about cities.[11] In turn, cities symbolize their home societies.[296]
Writers, painters, and filmmakers have produced innumerable works of art concerning the urban experience. Classical and medieval literature includes a genre of 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.[297]Fritz Lang conceived the idea for his influential 1927 film Metropolis while visiting Times Square and marveling at the nighttime neon lighting.[298] 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).[227]
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)[299] and visions of a single world-encompassing ecumenopolis.[300]
^The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small indeed. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no fixed definition of the lower boundary for their size; common definitions include "250,000" and "one million". This article is about large settlements, however defined.
H.G. Wells, Patrick Geddes and Kingsley Davis foretold the coming of a mostly urban world throughout the twentieth century.[101][102] The United Nations has long anticipated a half-urban world, earlier predicting the year 2000 as the turning point[103][104] and in 2007 writing that it would occur in 2008.[105] Other researchers had also estimated that the halfway point was reached in 2007.[106] Although the trend is undeniable, the precision of this statistic is dubious, due to reliance on national censuses and to the ambiguities of defining an area as urban.[101][14]
^Water resources in rapidly urbanizing areas are not merely privatized as they are in western countries; since the systems do not exist to begin with, private contracts also entail water industrialization and enclosure.[116] Also, there is a countervailing trend: 100 cities have re-municipalized their water supply since the 1990s.[217]
^Goodall, B. (1987) The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography. London: Penguin.
^Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) The Social Science Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
^Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 99.
^Ritchie, Hannah; Roser, Max (13 June 2018). "Urbanization". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 29 October 2020. Retrieved 14 February 2021.
^ ab"city, n.", Oxford English Dictionary, June 2014.
^ abKevin 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."
^Carter (1995), pp. 5–7. "[...] the two main themes of study introduced at the outset: the town as a distributed feature and the town as a feature with internal structure, or in other words, the town in area and the town as area."
^ abMarshall (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."
^ abLatham 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.
^Kaplan et al. (2004), pp. 34–35. "In the center of the city, an elite compound or temenos was situated. Study of the very earliest cities show this compound to be largely composed of a temple and supporting structures. The temple rose some 40 feet above the ground and would have presented a formidable profile to those far away. The temple contained the priestly class, scribes, and record keepers, as well as granaries, schools, crafts—almost all non-agricultural aspects of society.
^Li, X., & Zhou, W. (2019). Optimizing urban greenspace spatial pattern to mitigate urban heat island effects: Extending understanding from local to the city scale. URBAN FORESTRY & URBAN GREENING, 41, 255–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2019.04.008
^Carter (1995), p. 15. "In the underbound city the administratively defined area is smaller than the physical extent of settlement. In the overbound city the administrative area is greater than the physical extent. The 'truebound' city is one where the administrative bound is nearly coincidental with the physical extent."
^Paul James; Meg Holden; Mary Lewin; Lyndsay Neilson; Christine Oakley; Art Truter; David Wilmoth (2013). "Managing Metropolises by Negotiating Mega-Urban Growth". In Harald Mieg; Klaus Töpfer (eds.). Institutional and Social Innovation for Sustainable Urban Development. Routledge. Archived from the original on 16 August 2021. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
^Kaplan et al. (2004), p. 26. "Early cities also reflected these preconditions in that they served as places where agricultural surpluses were stored and distributed. Cities functioned economically as centers of extraction and redistribution from countryside to granaries to the urban population. One of the main functions of this central authority was to extract, store, and redistribute the grain. It is no accident that granaries—storage areas for grain—were often found within the temples of early cities."
^ abMumford (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."
^McQuillan (1937/1987), §1.03. "The ancients fostered the spread of urban culture; their efforts were constant to bring their people within the complete influence of municipal life. The desire to create cities was the most striking characteristic of the people of antiquity, and ancient rulers and statesmen vied with one another in satisfying that desire."
^Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art (October 2003). "Uruk: The First City". www.metmuseum.org. Archived from the original on 1 April 2020. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
^"Uruk (article)". Khan Academy. Archived from the original on 5 March 2022. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
; p. 2. "Southern Mesopotamia was a land of cities. It became one precociously, before the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Urban traditions remained strong and virtually continuous through the vicissitudes of conquest, internal upheaval accompanied by widespread economic breakdown, and massive linguistic and population replacement. The symbolic and material content of civilization obviously changed, but its cultural ambience remained tied to cities."
^Kaplan et al. (2004), pp. 41–42. "Rome created an elaborate urban system. Roman colonies were organized as a means of securing Roman territory. The first thing that Romans did when they conquered new territories was to establish cities."
^Kaplan et al. (2004), p. 43. "Capitals like Córdoba and Cairo had populations of about 500,000; Baghdad probably had a population of more than 1 million. This urban heritage would continue despite the conquests of the Seljuk Turks and the later Crusades. China, the longest standing civilization, was in the midst of a golden age as the Tang dynasty gave way—after a short period of fragmentation—to the Song dynasty. This dynasty ruled two of the most impressive cities on the planet, Xian and Hangzhou. / In contrast, poor Western Europe had not recovered from the sacking of Rome and the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire. For more than five centuries a steady process of deurbanization—whereby the population living in cities and the number of cities declined precipitously—had converted a prosperous landscape into a scary wilderness, overrun with bandits, warlords, and rude settlements."
from the original on 23 May 2020. Retrieved 24 January 2015.
^Laiou, Angeliki E. (2002). "Writing the Economic History of Byzantium". In Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.). The Economic History of Byzantium (Volume 1). Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. pp. 130–131. Archived from the original on 18 February 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
^Curtis (2016), pp. 5–6. "In the modern international system, cities were subjugated and internalized by the state, and, with industrialization, became the great growth engines of national economies."
^ abNicholas 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."
^Kaplan et al. (2004), pp. 53–54. "England was clearly at the center of these changes. London became the first truly global city by placing itself within the new global economy. English colonialism in North America, the Caribbean, South Asia, and later Africa and China helped to further fatten the wallets of many of its merchants. These colonies would later provide many of the raw materials for industrial production. England's hinterland was no longer confined to a portion of the world; it effectively became a global hinterland."
. "It is now clear that the deindustrialization thesis is part myth and part fact. Robert Z. Lawrence, for example, uses aggregate economic data to show that manufacturing employment in the United States did not decline but actually increased from 16.8 million in 1960, to 20.1 million in 1973, and 20.3 million in 1980. However, manufacturing employment was in relative decline. Barry Bluestone noted that manufacturing represented a decreasing proportion of the U.S. labour force, from 26.2 per cent in 1973 to 22.1 per cent in 1980. Studies in Canada have likewise shown that manufacturing employment was only in relative decline during these years. Yet mills and factories did close, and towns and cities lost their industries. John Cumbler submitted that 'depressions do not manifest themselves only at moments of national economic collapse' such as in the 1930s, but 'also recur in scattered sites across the nation in regions, in industries, and in communities.'"
^ abKaplan (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."
^James Xiaohe Zhang, "Rapid urbanization in China and its impact on the world economy"; 16th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, "New Challenges for Global Trade in a Rapidly Changing World", Shanhai Institute of Foreign Trade, 12–14 June 2013.
(PDF) from the original on 25 May 2017. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
^ abMoholy-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.
^"Patterns of Urban and Rural Population GrowthArchived 2018-11-13 at the Wayback Machine", Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, Population Studies No. 68; New York, United Nations, 1980; p. 15. "If the projections prove to be accurate, the next century will begin just after the world population achieves an urban majority; in 2000, the world is projected to be 51.3 per cent urban."
^Kaplan et al. (2004), p. 15. "Global cities need to be distinguished from megacities, defined here as cities with more than 8 million people. […] Only New York and London qualified as megacities 50 years ago. By 1990, just over 10 years ago, 20 megacities existed, 15 of which were in less economically developed regions of the world. In 2000, the number of megacities had increased to 26, again all except 6 are located in the less developed world regions."
^Frauke Kraas & Günter Mertins, "Megacities and Global Change"; in Kraas et al. (2014), p. 2. "While seven megacities (with more than five million inhabitants) existed in 1950 and 24 in 1990, by 2010 there were 55 and by 2025 there will be—according to estimations—87 megacities (UN 2012; Fig. 1). "
^Frauke Kraas & Günter Mertins, "Megacities and Global Change"; in Kraas et al. (2014), pp. 2–3. "Above all, globalisation processes were and are the motors that drive these enormous changes and are also the driving forces, together with transformation and liberalisation policies, behind the economic developments of the last c. 25 years (in China, especially the so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics that started under Deng Xiaoping in 1978/1979, in India essentially during the course of the economic reform policies of the so-called New Economic Policy as of 1991; Cartier 2001; Nissel 1999). Especially in megacities, these reforms led to enormous influx of foreign direct investments, to intensive industrialization processes through international relocation of production locations and depending upon the location, partially to considerable expansion of the services sector with increasing demand for office space as well as to a reorientation of national support policies—with a not to be mistaken influence of transnationally acting conglomerates but also considerable transfer payments from overseas communities. In turn, these processes are flanked and intensified through, at times, massive migration movements of national and international migrants into the megacities (Baur et al. 2006).
^Shipra Narang Suri & Günther Taube, "Governance in Megacities: Experiences, Challenges and Implications for International Cooperation"; in Kraas et al. (2014), p. 196.
. "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."
^Latham et al. (2009), p. 146. "The figurehead of city leadership is, of course, the mayor. As 'first citizen', mayors are often associated with political parties, yet many of the most successful mayors are often those whoare able to speak 'for' their city. Rudy Giuliani, for example, while pursuing a neo-liberal political agenda, was often seen as being outside the mainstream of the national Republican party. Furthermore, mayors are often crucial in articulating the interests of their cities to external agents, be they national governments or major public and private investors."
^McQuillan (1937/1987), §1.63. "The problem of achieving equitable balance between the two freedoms is infinitely greater in urban, metropolitan and megalopolitan situations than in sparsely settled districts and rural areas. / In the latter, sheer intervening space acts as a buffer between the privacy and well-being of one resident and the potential encroachments thereon by his neighbors in the form of noise, air or water pollution, absence of sanitation, or whatever. In a congested urban situation, the individual is powerless to protect himself from the "free" (i.e., inconsiderate or invasionary) acts of others without himself being guilty of a form of encroachment."
^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."
^ abRobert L. Lineberry, "Mandating Urban Equality: The Distribution of Municipal Public Services"; in Hahn & Levine (1980). See: Hawkins v. Town of Shaw (1971).
. "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."
. "A city's credit rating not only influences its ability to sell bonds, but has become a general signal of fiscal health. Detroit's partial recovery in the early 1990s, for example, was reversed when Moody's downgraded the rating of the city's general obligation bonds, precipitating new rounds of capital flight (Hackworth, 2007). The need to maintain a high credit rating constrains municipal actors by making it difficult to finance discretionary projects in traditional ways."
^Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 4, 29. "We thereby understand urban governance as the multiple ways through which city governments, businesses and residents interact in managing their urban space and life, nested within the context of other government levels and actors who are managing their space, resulting in a variety of urban governance configurations (Peyroux et al. 2014)."
^Gupta, Verrest, and Jaffe, "Theorizing Governance", in Gupta et al. (2015), pp. 30–31.
^ abGupta, 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."
^Shipra Narang Suri & Günther Taube, "Governance in Megacities: Experiences, Challenges and Implications for International Cooperation"; in Kraas et al. (2014), pp. 197–198.
^ abMcQuillin (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."
^Levy (2017), p. 10. "Planning is a highly political activity. It is immersed in politics and inseparable from the law. [...] Planning decisions often involve large sums of money, both public and private. Even when little public expenditure is involved, planning decisions can deliver large benefits to some and large losses at others."
^Jorge Hardoy, Urban Planning in Pre-Columbian America; New York: George Braziller, 1968.
), February 1848; translated from German to English by Samuel Moore. "But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level."
^ abMike 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."
^Latham et al. (2009), p. 160–164. "Indeed, the design of the buildings often revolves around the consumable fantasy experience, seen most markedly in the likes of Universal CityWalk, Disneyland and Las Vegas. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable (1997) names architectural structures built specifically as entertainment spaces as 'Architainment'. These places are, of course, places to make money, but they are also stages of performance for an interactive consumer.
. "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."
^McQuillan (1937/1987), §§1.04–1.05. "Almost by definition, cities have always provided the setting for great events and have been the focal points for social change and human development. All great cultures have been city-born. World history is basically the history of city dwellers."
^Magnusson (2011), p. 21. "These statistics probably underestimate the degree to which the world has been urbanized, since they obscure the fact that rural areas have become so much more urban as a result of modern transportation and communication. A farmer in Europe or California who checks the markets every morning on the computer, negotiates with product brokers in distant cities, buys food at a supermarket, watches television every night, and takes vacations half a continent away is not exactly living a traditional rural life. In most respects such a farmer is an urbanite living in the countryside, albeit an urbanite who has many good reasons for perceiving himself or herself as a rural person."
^Mumford (1961), pp. 563–567. "Many of the original functions of the city, once natural monopolies, demanding the physical presence of all participants, have now been transposed into forms capable of swift transportation, mechanical manifolding, electronic transmission, worldwide distribution."
: "The CITY no longer exists, except as a cultural ghost [...] The INSTANTANEOUS global coverage of radio-tv makes the city form meaningless, functionless."
^Ashworth, Kavaratzis, & Warnaby, "The Need to Rethink Place Branding"; in Kavaratzis, Warnaby, & Ashworth (2015), p. 15.
. "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."
^Ashworth (1991). "In more recent years, planned networks of defended settlements as part of military strategies can be found in the pacification programmes of what has become the conventional wisdom of anti-insurgency operations. Connected networks of protected settlements are inserted as islands of government control into insurgent areas—either defensively to separate existing populations from insurgents or aggressively as a means of extending control over areas—as used by the British in South Africa (1899–1902) and Malaya (1950–3) and by the Americans in Cuba (1898) and Vietnam (1965–75). These were generally small settlements and intended as much for local security as offensive operations. / The planned settlement policy of the State of Israel, however, has been both more comprehensive and has longer-term objectives. [...] These settlements provide a source of armed manpower, a defence in depth of a vulnerable frontier area and islands of cultural and political control in the midst of a potentially hostile population, thus continuing a tradition of the use of such settlements as part of similar policies in that area which is over 2,000 years old."
^See Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell's telegraphic circular to all station commanders, 8 December 1901, in Robert D. Ramsey III, A Masterpiece of Counterguerrilla Warfare: BG J. Franklin Bell in the Philippines, 1901–1902Archived 16 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Long War Series, Occasion Paper 25; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute Press, US Army Combined Arms Center; pp. 45–46. "Commanding officers will also see that orders are at once given and distributed to all the inhabitants within the jurisdiction of towns over which they exercise supervision, informing them of the danger of remaining outside of these limits and that unless they move by December 25th from outlying barrios and districts with all their movable food supplies, including rice, palay, chickens, live stock, etc., to within the limits of the zone established at their own or nearest town, their property (found outside of said zone at said date) will become liable to confiscation or destruction."
^Ashworth (1991), pp. 91–93. "However, some specific sorts of crime, together with those antisocial activities which may or may not be treated as crime (such as vandalism, graffiti daubing, littering and even noisy or boisterous behavior), do play various roles in the process of insurgency. This leads in consequence to defensive reactions on the part of those responsible for public security, and by individual citizens concerned for their personal safety. The authorities react with situational crime prevention as part of the armoury of urban defense, and individuals fashion their behavior according to an 'urban geography of fear'."
^Adams (1981), p. 132 "Physical destruction and ensuing decline of population were certain to be particularly severe in the case of cities that joined unsuccessful rebellions, or whose ruling dynasts were overcome by others in abbtle. The traditional lamentations provide eloquently stylized literary accounts of this, while in other cases the combinations of archaeological evidence with the testimony of a city's like Ur's victorious opponent as to its destruction grounds the world of metaphor in harsh reality (Brinkman 1969, pp. 311–312)."
^Burns H. Westou, "Nuclear Weapons Versus International Law: A Contextual ReassessmentArchived 2017-10-10 at the Wayback Machine"; McGill Law Journal 28, p. 577. "As noted above, nuclear weapons designed for countervalue or city-killing purposes tend to be of the strategic class, with known yields of deployed warheads averaging somewhere between two and three times and 1500 times the firepower of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
^Francis, David; Hengeveld, Henry (1998). Extreme weather and climate change(PDF). Environment Canada (Report). Archived(PDF) from the original on 22 October 2022. Retrieved 22 October 2022 – via Iowa State University.
^Kath Wellman & Frederik Pretorius, "Urban Infrastructure: Productivity, Project Evaluation, and Finance"; in Wellman & Spiller (2012), pp. 73–74. "The NCP established a legislative regime at Federal and State levels to facilitate third-party access to provision and operation of infrastructure facilities, including electricity and telecommunications networks, gas and water pipelines, railroad terminals and networks, airports, and ports. Following these reforms, few countries embarked on a larger scale initiative than Australia to privatize delivery and management of public infrastructure at all levels of government."
^Latham et al. (2009), p. 75. "By the 1960s, however, this 'integrated ideal' was being challenged, public infrastructure entering into crisis. There is now a new orthodoxy in many branches of urban planning: 'The logic is now for planners to fight for the best possible networked infrastructures for their specialized district, in partnership with (often privatised and internationalised network) operators, rather than seeking to orchestrate how networks roll out through the city as a whole' (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 113). In the context of development theory, these 'secessionary' infrastructures physically by-pass sectors of cities unable to afford the necessary cabling, pipe-laying, or streetscaping that underpins service provision. Cities such as Manila, Lagos or Mumbai are thus increasingly characterized by a two-speed mode of urbanization.
^"public, adj. and n.", Oxford English Dictionary, September 2007.
^Grava (2003), 301–305. "There are a great many places where [buses] are the only public service mode offered; to the best of the author's knowledge, no city that has transit operates without a bus component. Leaving aside private cars, all indicators—passengers carried, vehicle kilometers accumulated, size of fleet, accidents recorded, pollution caused, workers employed, or whatever else—show the dominance of buses among all transit modes, in this country as well as anywhere else around the world. […] At the global scale, there are probably 8000 to 10,000 communities and cities that provide organized bus transit. The larger places have other modes as well, but the bulk of these cities offers buses as their sole public means of mobility."
from the original on 10 December 2021. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
^McQuillin (1937/1987), §1.74. "It cannot be too strongly emphasized that no city begins to be well-planned until it has solved its housing problem. The problems of living and working are of primary importance. These include sanitation, sufficient sewers, clean, well-lighted streets, rehabilitation of slum areas, and health protection through provision for pure water and wholesome food.
^Ray Forrest & Peter Williams, Housing in the Twentieth Century"; in Paddison (2001).
^Herbert Sukopp, "On the Early History of Urban Ecology in Europe"; in Marzluff et al. (2008).
^ abcdeS.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).
^Ingo Kowarik, "On the Role of Alien Species in Urban Flora and Vegetation"; in Marzluff et al. (2008).
^Gallo, T., Fidino, M., Lehrer, E. W., & Magle, S. B. (2017). Mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in urban green spaces: Implications for urban wildlife conservation. Ecological Applications, 27(8), 2330–2341. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1611
^Roberto Camagni, Roberta Capello, & Peter Nijkamp, "Managing Sustainable Urban Environments"; in Paddison (2001).
^Abrahamson (2004), pp. 2–4. "The linkages among cities cutting across nations became a global network. It is important to note here that the key nodes in the international system are (global) cities, not nations. [...] Once the linkages among cities became a global network, nations became dependent upon their major cities for connections to the rest of the world."
^ abHerrschel & 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."
^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)."
^Herrschel & Newman (2017), pp. 9–10. "The merchants of the Hanseatic League, for instance, enjoyed substantial trading privileges as a result of inter-city diplomacy and collective agreements within the networks (Lloyd 2002), as well as with larger powers, such as states. That way, the League could negotiate 'extra-territorial' legal spaces with special privileges, such as the 'German Steelyard' in the port of London (Schofield 2012). This special status was granted and guaranteed by the English king as part of an agreement between the state and a foreign city association."
^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
^Abrahamson (2004), p. 4. "The formerly major industrial cities that were most able quickly and thoroughly to transform themselves into the new postindustrial mode became the leading global cities—the centers of the new global system."
from the original on 1 March 2020. Retrieved 20 December 2017. Against those writers who, by emphasizing the importance of financial exchange systems, distinguish a few special cities as 'global cities'—commonly London, Paris, New York and Tokyo—we recognize the uneven global dimensions of all the cities that we study. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, is a globalizing city, though perhaps more significantly in cultural than economic terms. And so is Dili globalizing, the small and 'insignificant' capital of Timor Leste—except this time it is predominantly in political terms...
^Kaplan (2004), pp. 91–95. "The United States is also dominant in providing high-quality, global engineering-design services, accounting for approximately 50 percent of the world's total exports. The disproportionate presence of these U.S.-headquartered firms is attributable to the U.S. role in overseas automobile production, the electronics and petroleum industries, and various kinds of construction, including work on the country's numerous overseas air and navy military bases."
^Michael Samers, "Immigration and the Global City Hypothesis: Towards an Alternative Research Agenda"; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(2), June 2002. "And not withstanding some major world cities that do not have comparatively high levels of immigration, like Tokyo, it may in fact be the presence of such large-scale immigrant economic 'communities' (with their attendant global financial remittances and their ability to incubate small business growth, rather than their complementarity to producer services employment) which partially distinguishes mega-cities from other more nationally oriented urban centres."
; p. 29: "These apparently rather different takes on London's 'global city' status are of course not so far removed from one another as they may first appear. Holding them together is the figure of the migrant worker. The reliance of London's financial institutions and business services industries on the continuing flow of highly skilled labour from overseas is now well known (Beaverstock and Smith 1996). Less well known is the extent to which London's economy as a whole is now dependent upon the labour power of low-paid workers from across the world."
^Herrschel & Newman (2017), p. "In Europe, the EU provides incentives and institutional frameworks for multiple new forms of city and regional networking and lobbying, including at the international EU level. But a growing number of cities and regions also seek to 'go it alone' by establishing their own representations in Brussels, either individually or in shared accommodation, as the base for European lobbying."
. "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."
^Diseko, L. (2022, August 24). South Africans in nationwide strike in protest against cost of living. BBC News. Retrieved March 5, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-62659893
^"The Vancouver Action Plan"; Approved at Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Vancouver, Canada; 31 May to 11 June 1976.
; 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'."
^Akin L. Mabogunje, "A New Paradigm for Urban Development"; Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1991. "Irrespective of the economic outcome, the regime of structural adjustment being adopted in most developing countries today is likely to spur urbanization. If structural adjustment actually succeeds in turning around economic performance, the enhanced gross domestic product is bound to attract more migrants to the cities; if it fails, the deepening misery—especially in the rural areas—is certain to push more migrants to the city."
^Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, "City Imaginaries", in Bridge & Watson, eds. (2000).
^Herrschel & Newman (2017), pp. 7–8. "Growing inequalities as a result of neo-liberal globalism, such as between the successful cities and the less successful, struggling, often peripheral, cities and regions, produce rising political discontent, such as we are now facing across Europe and in the United States as populist accusations of self-serving metropolitan elitism."
J.E. Cirlot, "City"; A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd ed., translated from Spanish to English by Jack Read; New York: Philosophical Library, 1971; pp. 48–49 (online
^Leach (1993), p. 345. "The German film director Fritz Lang was inspired to 'make a film' about 'the sensations' he felt when he first saw Times Square in 1923; a place 'lit as if in full daylight by neon lights and topping them oversized luminous advertisements moving, turning, flashing on and off ... something completely new and nearly fairly-tale-like for a European ... a luxurious cloth hung from a dark sky to dazzle, distract, and hypnotize.' The film Lang made turned out to be The Metropolis, an unremittingly dark vision of a modern industrial city.
^Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow's CityArchived 10 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine; 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."
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Kemp, Roger L. "City and Gown Relations: A Handbook of Best Practices," McFarland and Company, Inc., Publisher, Jefferson, North Carolina, US, and London, (2013). (
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