city, relatively permanent and highly organized centre of population, of greater size or importance than a town or village. The name city is given to certain urban communities by virtue of some legal or conventional distinction that can vary between regions or nations. In most cases, however, the concept of city refers to a particular type of community, the urban community, and its culture, known as “urbanism.”
City government is almost everywhere the creation of higher political authority—usually state or national. In most Western countries, devolution of powers to the cities occurs through legislative acts that delegate limited self-government to local corporations. Some European countries adopted general municipal codes that permitted centralized administrative control over subordinate areas through a hierarchy of departmental prefects and local mayors. Socialist countries generally employed a hierarchical system of local councils corresponding to, and under the authority of, governing bodies at higher levels of government.
As a type of community, the city may be regarded as a relatively permanent concentration of population, together with its diverse habitations, social arrangements, and supporting activities, occupying a more or less discrete site and having a cultural importance that differentiates it from other types of human settlement and association. In its elementary functions and rudimentary characteristics, however, a city is not clearly distinguishable from a town or even a large village. Mere size of population, surface area, or density of settlement are not in themselves sufficient criteria of distinction, while many of their social correlates (division of labour, nonagricultural activity, central-place functions, and creativity) characterize in varying degree all urban communities from the small country town to the giant metropolis.
In the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age; roughly 9000 to 3000 bc), humans achieved relatively fixed settlement, but for perhaps 5,000 years such living was confined to the semipermanent peasant village—semipermanent because, when the soil had been exhausted by the relatively primitive methods of cultivation, the entire village was usually compelled to pick up and move to another location. Even when a village prospered in one place, it would commonly split in two after the population had grown relatively large so that all cultivators would have ready access to the soil.
The evolution of the Neolithic village into a city took at least 1,500 years—in the Old World from 5000 to 3500 bc. The technological developments making it possible for humankind to live in urban places were at first mainly advances in agriculture. Neolithic-era domestication of plants and animals eventually led to improved methods of cultivation and stock breeding, which eventually produced a surplus and made it possible to sustain a higher population density while also freeing up some members of the community for craftsmanship and the production of nonessential goods and services.
As human settlements increased in size through advances in irrigation and cultivation, the need for improving the circulation of goods and people became ever more acute. Pre-Neolithic humans, who led a nomadic existence in their never-ending search for food, moved largely by foot and carried their essential goods with the help of other humans. Neolithic people, upon achieving the domestication of animals, used them for transportation as well as for food and hides—thus making it possible to travel greater distances. Then came the use of draft animals in combination with a sledge equipped with runners for carrying heavier loads. The singular technological achievement in the early history of transportation, however, was the invention of the wheel, used first in the Tigris-Euphrates valley about 3500 bc and constructed of solid materials (the development of hubs, spokes, and rims would follow). Wheels, to be used efficiently, required roads, and thus came road building, an art most highly developed in ancient times by the Romans. Parallel improvements were made in water transport: irrigation ditches and freshwater supply routes first constructed in the 7th century bc were followed by the development of navigable canals, while rafts, dugouts, and reed floats were eventually succeeded by wooden boats.
The first recognizable cities had emerged by approximately 3500 bc. As the earliest urban populations, they were distinguished by literacy, technological progress (notably in metals), and increasingly sophisticated forms of social and political organization (formalized in religious-legal codes and symbolized in temples and walls). Such places first developed in the Nile valley and on the Sumerian coast at Ur, appearing in the Indus valley at Mohenjo-daro during the 3rd millennium bc; by 2000 bc cities had also appeared in the Wei River valley in China. The overland trade routes brought about the proliferation of cities from Turkestan to the Caspian Sea and then to the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean. Their economic base in agriculture (supplemented by trade) and their political-religious institutions gave cities an unprecedented degree of occupational specialization and social stratification. City life was not insular, however, as many cities lent some coherence and direction to life and society in their hinterlands.
It was in the Greek city-state, or polis, that the city idea reached its peak. Originally a devout association of patriarchal clans, the polis came to be a small self-governing community of citizens, in contrast to the Asian empires and nomadic groups elsewhere in the world. For citizens, at least, the city and its laws constituted a moral order symbolized in an acropolis, magnificent buildings, and public assemblies. It was, in Aristotle’s phrase, “a common life for a noble end.”
When the exclusive requirements for citizenship (citizens originally being landowning men with no history of servitude) were relaxed and as new commercial wealth surpassed that of the older landed citizenry, social strife at home and rivalry abroad gradually weakened the common life of the city-republics. The creativity and variety of the polis gave way before the unifying forces of king worship and empire epitomized by Alexander the Great and his successors. To be sure, many new cities—often named Alexandria because Alexander had founded them—were planted between the Nile and the Indus, facilitating contacts between the major civilizations of Europe and Asia and giving rise to cultural exchanges and commercial trade that left a lasting impact on both East and West. While remaining culturally vibrant, the city itself ceased to be an autonomous body politic and became a dependent member of a larger political-ideological whole.
The Romans, who fell heir to the Hellenistic world, transplanted the city into the technologically backward areas beyond the Alps inhabited by pastoral-agricultural Celtic and Germanic peoples. But, if Rome brought order to civilization and carried both to barbarians along the frontier, it made of the city a means to empire (a centre for military pacification and bureaucratic control) rather than an end in itself. The enjoyment of the imperial Roman peace entailed the acceptance of the status of municipium—a respectable but subordinate rank within the Roman state. The municipia were supported fiscally by taxes on trade, contributions from members of the community, and income from lands owned by each municipium. Over time, however, the idea of public duty gave way to private ambition, especially as Roman citizenship became more universal (see civitas). Municipal functions atrophied, and the city survived into the Byzantine era principally as a mechanism of fiscal administration, although it often remained a locus of educational development and religious and cultural expression.
In Latin Europe neither political nor religious reforms could sustain the Roman regime. The breakdown of public administration and the breach of the frontier led to a revival of parochial outlook and allegiance, but the focus was not upon the city. Community life centred instead on the fortress (e.g., walled city), whereas the civitas was attached to the precincts of the episcopal throne, as in Merovingian Gaul.
Early medieval society was a creation of camp and countryside that fulfilled the local imperatives of sustenance and defense. With Germanic variations on late Roman forms, communities were restructured into functional estates, each of which owned formal obligations, immunities, and jurisdictions. What remained of the city was comprehended in this manorial order, and the distinction between town and country was largely obscured when secular and ecclesiastical lords ruled over the surrounding counties—often as the vassals of barbarian kings (see manorialism). Social ethos and organization enforced submission to the common good of earthly survival and heavenly reward. The attenuation of city life in most of northern and western Europe was accompanied by provincial separatism, economic isolation, and religious otherworldliness. Not before the cessation of attacks by Magyars, Vikings, and Saracens did urban communities again experience sustained growth.
Recovery after the 10th century was not confined to the city or to any one part of Europe. The initiatives of monastic orders, seigneurs, or lords of the manor, and merchants alike fostered a new era of increased tillage, craftsmanship and manufacturing, a money economy, scholarship, growth of rural population, and founding of “new towns,” as distinguished from those “Roman” cities that had survived from the period of Germanic and other encroachments. In almost all the “new” medieval towns, the role of the merchant was central in catalyzing the long-distance trade of commodities and staple goods.
Before the year 1000, contacts with rich Byzantine and Islamic areas in the Levant had revitalized the mercantile power in Venice, which grew wealthy from its command of the profitable route to the Holy Land during the Crusades. Meanwhile, merchant communities had attached themselves to the more-accessible castle towns and dioceses in northern Italy and on the main routes to the Rhineland and Champagne. They later appeared along the rivers of Flanders and northern France and on the west-east road from Cologne to Magdeburg (see Hanseatic League). In all of these towns, trade was the key to their growth and development.
It was no coincidence that the 12th and 13th centuries, which saw the founding of more new towns than any time between the fall of Rome and the Industrial Revolution, also witnessed a singular upsurge toward civic autonomy. Throughout western Europe, towns acquired various kinds of municipal institutions loosely grouped under the designation commune. Broadly speaking, the history of the medieval towns is that of the rising merchant classes seeking to free their communities from lordly jurisdiction and to secure their government to themselves. Wherever monarchical power was strong, the merchants had to be content with a municipal status, but elsewhere they created city-states. Taking advantage of renewed conflict between popes and emperors, they allied with local nobility to establish communal self-government in the largest cities of Lombardy, Tuscany, and Liguria. In Germany the city councils sometimes usurped the rights of higher clergy and nobility; Freiburg im Breisgau obtained its exemplary charter of liberties in 1120. The movement spread to Lübeck and later to associated Hanse towns on the Baltic and North seas, touching even the Christian “colonial” towns east of the Elbe and Saale rivers. In the 13th century the great towns of Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, creditors of the counts of Flanders, virtually governed the entire province. In France, revolutionary uprisings, directed against nobility and clergy, sometimes established free communes, but most communities were content with a franchise from their sovereign—despite their limitations compared with the relative liberty of English boroughs after the Norman Conquest. Finally the corporate freedom of the towns brought emancipation to individuals. When bishops in the older German cities treated newcomers as serfs, the emperor Henry V affirmed the principle Stadtluft macht frei (German: “City air brings freedom”) in charters for Speyer and Worms; such new towns, founded on the lands of lay and clerical lords, offered freedom and land to settlers who took up residence for more than “a year and a day.” In France the villes neuves (“new towns”) and bastides (medieval French towns laid out on a rectangular grid) likewise conferred rights on servile persons.
In the 14th century the growth of urban centres subsided as Europe suffered a series of shocks that included famine from 1315 to 1317, the emergence of the Black Death, which spread across Europe starting in 1347, and a period of political anarchy and economic decline that continued through the 15th century. Turkish encroachments on the routes to Asia worsened conditions in town and country alike. Europe turned inward upon itself, and, except for a few large centres, activity in the marketplace was depressed. At a time when local specialization and interregional exchange required more-liberal trade policies, craft protectionism and corporate particularism in the cities tended to hobble the course of economic growth. The artisan and labouring classes, moreover, grew strong enough to challenge the oligarchical rule of the wealthy burghers and gentry through disruptions such as the Revolt of the Ciompi (1378), while social warfare peaked in peasant uprisings typified by the Jacquerie (1358), but these tended to be short-lived revolts that failed to bring enduring social change. The era of decline was relieved, some argue, by the slow process of individual emancipation and the cultural efflorescence of the Renaissance, which effectively grew out of the unique urban environment of Italy and was strengthened by a high regard for the Classical heritage. These values laid the intellectual basis for the great age of geographic and scientific discovery exemplified in the new technologies of gunpowder, mining, printing, and navigation. Not before the triumph of princely government, in fact, did political allegiance, economic interests, and spiritual authority again become centred in a viable unit of organization, the absolutist nation-state.
The virtue of absolutism in the early modern period lay in its ability to utilize the new technologies on a large scale. Through the centralization of power, economy, and belief, it brought order and progress to Europe and provided a framework in which individual energies could once more be channeled to a common end. While the nation stripped the cities of their remaining pretensions to political and economic independence (heretofore symbolized in their walls and tariff barriers), it created larger systems of interdependence in which territorial division of labour could operate. National wealth also benefited from the new mercantilist policies, but all too often the wealth generated by cities was captured by the state in taxes and then dissipated—either in war or by supporting the splendour of court life and the Baroque glory of palaces and churches. Only in colonial areas, notably the Americas, did the age of expansion see the development of many new cities, and it is significant that the capitals and ports of the colonizing nations experienced their most rapid growth during these years. Under absolutist regimes, however, a few large political and commercial centres grew at the expense of smaller outlying communities and the rural hinterlands.
By the 18th century the mercantile classes had grown increasingly disenchanted with monarchical rule. Merchants resented their lack of political influence and assured prestige, and they objected to outmoded regulations that created barriers to commerce—especially those that hindered their efforts to link commercial operations with improved production systems such as factories. Eventually, the merchants would unite with other dissident groups to curb the excesses of absolutism, erase the vestiges of feudalism, and secure a larger voice in the shaping of public policy. In northwestern Europe, where these liberal movements went furthest, the city populations and their influential bourgeois elites played a critical role that was disproportionate to their numbers. Elsewhere, as in Germany, the bourgeoisie was more reconciled to existing regimes or, as in northern Italy, had assumed a passive if not wholly parasitical role.
With the exceptions of Great Britain and the Netherlands, however, the proportion of national populations resident in urban areas nowhere exceeded 10 percent. As late as 1800 only 3 percent of world population lived in towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants. No more than 45 cities had populations over 100,000, and fewer than half of these were situated in Europe. Asia had almost two-thirds of the world’s large-city population, and cities such as Beijing (Peking), Guangzhou (Canton), and Tokyo (Edo) were larger than ancient Rome or medieval Constantinople at their peaks.
Before 1800, innovations in agricultural and manufacturing techniques had permitted a singular concentration of productive activity close to the sources of mechanical power—water and coal. A corresponding movement of population was accelerated by the perfection of the steam engine and the superiority of the factory over preindustrial business organization. From the standpoint of economy, therefore, the localization of differentiated but functionally integrated work processes near sources of fuel was the mainspring of industrial urbanism. Under conditions of belt-and-pulley power transmission, urban concentration was a means of (1) minimizing the costs of overcoming frictions in transport and communications and (2) maximizing internal economies of scale and external economies of agglomeration. Although the intellectual and social prerequisites for industrialization were not uniquely present in any one nation, an unusual confluence of commercial, geographic, and technological factors in Britain led to far-reaching changes in such strategic activities as textiles, transport, and iron. Britain became “the workshop of the world” and London its “head office.” Differentiation went so far that the cotton, wool, and iron districts became more specialized and productive, each proceeding within its own cycle of technical and organizational change. By the mid-19th century, similar if less-comprehensive industrial organization was evident in parts of France, the Low Countries, and the northeastern United States.
The concentration of the manufacturing labour force in mill towns and coke towns gradually undermined traditional social structures and relations. Problems of public order, health, housing, utilities, education, and morals were aggravated by the influx of newcomers from the countryside. The combination of high rural birth rates and the industrialization of agriculture raised production levels of foods and fibres but also caused more children to migrate to cities, as fewer were needed to work on the increasingly mechanized farms. Though the lowering of mortality in the 19th century was later offset by declines in fertility, the population of the more-industrialized nations boomed into the 20th century, and the greater part of the increment migrated to the larger towns. The outcome was rural depopulation and the urbanization of society. Local political and social institutions, often of medieval origin, were unable to cope with conditions that exaggerated poverty, disrupted family life, and complicated personal adjustment. Piecemeal reforms did little to improve the new milieu because, in the last analysis, the “city problem” arose not so much from the lack of public authority as from an unwillingness to pay the costs of social planning, public health, and civic improvement. Generations of urbanites therefore faced long work hours, poor work conditions, overcrowded housing, and inadequate sanitation. The populations of cities, however, adapted to the new urban norms, evidently striking a balance between the deleterious consequences of urbanization and the economic and cultural opportunities uniquely associated with the city.
In the century after 1850, world population doubled, and the proportion of people living in cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants rose from less than 7 percent to almost 30 percent. Between 1900 and 1950 the population living in large cities (100,000 plus) rose by 250 percent, the rate of increase in Asia being three times that in Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, the pattern of industrial urbanization—an overwhelmingly nonagricultural economy organized in a hierarchical system of different-sized cities ranging from one or more metropolitan centres at the top to a broad base of smaller-sized cities underneath—was still largely confined to the economically advanced areas: Europe, North America, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Australasia.
Meanwhile, industrial urbanism had entered its metropolitan phase. Especially in the United States, the widespread use of cheap electric power, the advent of rapid transit and communications, new building materials, the automobile, and rising levels of per capita personal income had led to some relaxation of urban concentration. City dwellers began moving out from older downtown areas to suburbs and satellite communities where conditions were thought to be less wearing on nerves and bodies. Rising central-area land values and property taxes, traffic congestion, decaying infrastructure, and street crime reinforced the exodus. At the city’s core the composition of the resident population came to include growing proportions of the aged, minority groups, and the very poor.
Just as populations shifted from city centres to suburbs and broader conurbations, manufacturing companies began building their production plants on suburban or rural sites, thereby taking advantage of cheaper land costs, lower labour expenses, less-cumbersome municipal regulation, smaller tax burdens, and, in many cases, more-efficient transportation routes. By the 21st century it was evident that advanced economies would depend more on human capital than on physical capital and on the production of services rather than the manufacture of goods; as a consequence, cities were shifting from loci of industrial production to centres of knowledge. Thus, while its advantages for manufacturers have diminished, the city remains a fundamental locus for the mass of specialized service activity that forms so large a part of the modern economy.