Cities Through the Ages: One Thing or Many?

Abstract

The variability among cities, from the ancient world to the present, can be organized usefully in two ways. First, a focus on the dominant urban activities and processes leads to the recognition of two basic urban types: economic cities and political cities. Most cities today are economic cities in which growth proceeds through agglomeration processes. By contrast, most cities in the ancient world (and some today) are political cities, in which power and administration play a major role in structuring cities and generating change. Second, an alternative focus on processes of social interaction within the urban built environment leads to the recognition that there is only one kind of settlement that includes all cities-economic and political; past and present. Cities in this sense are settings for "energized crowding." Processes of interaction generate both economic and political growth, and they produce and influence the built forms and social characteristics of all cities. Our model helps scholars distinguish the unique from the universal traits of cities today and in the past.

Urban Success and Urban Adaptation Over the Long Run

“…de Long and Shleifer (1993) discuss these relationships and point out that while "urban populations are good measures of preindustrial economic prosperity" (p. 674), this correlation does not work in all contexts. Indeed, Smith and Lobo (2019) suggest that the relationship between economic activity, political activity, and city size differs between what they call "economic cities" and "political cities" (see also, Ades and Glaeser, 1995). An examination of the demographic trajectories of individual settlements provides some context on the use of population size and growth as measures of the success of cities and settlements.…”

Monetize the Urban Multiplier: A Study of India’s National Infrastructure Pipeline and National Monetization Plan

“…Cities are enablers of the transitions in various infrastructure sectors such as energy, digital technology, agriculture, industry, and transportation and logistics, driving the growth in many countries (Gebre & Gebremedhin, 2019). They are considered nodes in an integrated economy that connects producers to consumers and farms to forks through supply chains (Smith & Lobo, 2019). They function as growth hubs, demand generators and suppliers of innovation, skills and finance for these development transitions, but aged and inadequate infrastructure, poorly delivered municipal services and constrained local finances make them highly vulnerable to cascading risks (Gebre & Gebremedhin, 2019).…”

“…The Task Force recognized that cities are integrated with the larger economic transformation of the country, represented by transitions in energy, transportation, commerce and agriculture (DEA MoF, 2020b). Cities have a multiplier effect on the economy and are an asset class that can be effectively leveraged to pay for new infrastructure (Domański & Gwosdz, 2010; Smith & Lobo, 2019). The urban multiplier can provide a framework for prioritizing the NMP and the creation of synergies between projects and monetization (Niti Aayog, 2021a).…”

Shades of Urbanism(s) and Urbanity in Pre-Colonial Africa: Towards Afro-Centred Interventions

“…In the global West, most contemporary explications of urbanism in disciplines such as geography and sociology are derivatives of sociological and functional theoretical positions (Wirth 1938;Childe 1950;Bascom 1959;Adams 1966;Smith and Lobo 2019). These consider cities as central places characterized by functional specialization and populated by socially heterogeneous groups (Cowgill 2004).…”

“…The deep history of urbanism (being a city) continues to be a foremost research theme in archaeology and cognate fields (Wirth 1938;Childe 1950;Bascom 1959;Adams 1966;Wheatley 1970;Blanton 1976;Fox 1977;Andah 1982;McIntosh 1999;Cowgill 2004;Smith 2006;Manyanga, Pikirayi, and Chirikure 2010;Connah 2015;Smith 2016;Smith and Lobo 2019). This is hardly surprising because with sharp intensity, urbanism and the concomitant urbanity (life within cities) have, over the past few centuries, crystallized as dominant forms of human organizational comportments on earth.…”