THE CITY IN HISTORY
Here the author talks about the origins of towns/cities and birth of an urban form which begun with Neolithic settlements in Western Asia, 2000/3000 years before the origination of mesopotamia. Some of the towns took urban form within huge stine walls, densely populated, had commercial trading with local materials, had streets, shrines, shops etc. Later 3500BC onwards cities started taking place in Asia, North Africa, China and most of them were along with river or near by, as import and export of goods was easy to transport via water channel. The development of these cities was uneven over space and time, at the same time urban systems had inbuilt stability. For example, in case of China, holding and penetration of unsettled tracts was in fact an expansion of systematic agriculture centered in peasant villages.Once the land was tamed, more villages were built up as centers of imperial authority. While in the contrast, Greece, Rome & Eastern Europe new towns were considered mandatory in the process of colonization.
In case of Urban origination, there is still chicken/egg circumventions, dis such things create necessity for cities or did an urban presence bring about such? The question of which came first, town or city is not simple either. Changes in social institutions were more likely to precipitate changes in technology and complex notions about subsistence and surplus in formation of cities. There are different theories that gave birth to cities like Military & Religious theories. As explained in the given example of Madurai ( South India) and Calais ( French Coastal City), originated at different times but took its solid geometrical form with central administrative activity and both were surrounded by walls. It is doubtful if a single, autonomous, causative factor will ever be identified in the nexus of social, economic & political transformations which resulted in the emergence of urban forms. Whatever structural changes in social organization were induced by commerce, warfare or technology, they needed to be validated by some instrument of authority if they were to achieve institutionalized permanence. In Madurai, the temple was administrative authority for the city and it is still dominant feature of the city. Towns are built for and by people, their regional and local sittings are the result of decisions taken by people and not of some inevitable physical control. Whatever the initial reasons for a town’s foundation on a particular site, once established it generates its own infrastructure, transport network and so on.Early cities took their shapes to some erratic social agglomeration around an administrative core as they did to natural adjustments or “biological rhythm”. For example Egypt was designed totally in ordered environments, with streets, seriated housing units, and random residential heirarchy. While cities like Mohenjo Daro had schematic orthogonal planning applied to the entire urban fabric, blocks were of roughly equal size and rational distinction was made between main streets & the alleys that separated the houses. No mater what practices of urbanization may have been, ancient traditions insisted that making cities was an intentional act, approved and implemented at the highest level.
WHAT IS A CITY?
The city is relatively large , dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals according to L.Wirth. In other words, City is a point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community according to Mumford. It is regardless of its origin, form, makers, era. Following are different charactories of a city. Cities are densely populated compare to their surrounding developments, regardless of its size. Cities come in clusters, accompanied by other towns. cities are places that have physical circumscription, whether material or symbolic to separate those who belong in the urban order from those who do not. Cities are places where there is specialized differentiation of work, which creat their own social heirarchies. Cities are places favoured by a source of income. Cities relies on written records. Cities are places that are intimately engaged with their countryside, that have a territorry that feeds them and which they protect and provide service for. Often city form if locked into rural systems of land division. Cities are places distinguished by some kind of monumental definition, where the fabric is more than a blanket of residences. Finally, Cities are made up of buildings and people. According to Kevin Lynch, City forms, their actual function, values and ideas that people attach to them make up a single phenomenon. Cities in ther physical aspect are stubbornly long lived. the most enduring feature of the city is its physical build, which remains with remarkable persistence, gaining increments that are responsive to the most recent aconomic demand and reflective of the latest stylistic vogue, but conserving evidence of past urban culture for present and future generations.
THE GENERIC CITY
In this topic, the Author has divided the story in to 17 fragments from introduction to end, in which he talks about different aspects of the City. In introduction, the Author throws a debate for the defination of “Generic City”.
The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project
The author Robert Park has analyzed the work of Ernest W. Burgess, a sociologist. The author discuss how Individualism affects socialism and ultimately to the growth of the city and vice-verse by reinventing modern sociology through taking academic research to the streets as a “living laboratory”. The author talks about transition from rural to an urban civilization and characteristics of American/Europian cities. The city is a place where ‘we find larger number of women to men, greater percentage of youth and middle-aged, higher ratio of foreign born, the increased heterogeneity of occupation’ takes place and grows even more along with the City growth. The author also talks about Burgess’s city model which was quite criticized by urban theorists, is based on series of concentric circles that divided the city into 5 zones and established the study of “social ecology” to understand the underlying patterns of urban growth and development. The model was derived as a mono-centre growth, which is not always applicable to another cities since many cities are based on “multi-center growth”. The author talk about 2 types of city expansion -
1. Expansion as physical growth – Urban population, business development, expansion of neighbouring towns, creation of new transportation systems, technical growth, etc plays major role not only as for increasing growth rate of the city but also for future controlling the city.
2. Expansion as a process – Here the author talks about the concentric model with corcular loop system which defines each zone of the city. It starts from central business district, business/manufacture zone, working men’s residential zone, exclusive residential zone and commuter’s zone respectively.