cities

 Every year, more than fifty million people make Walt Disney World in Florida their homes for at least a day. Seventy thousand people are employed in the theme parks that turned Orlando from a sleepy town in central Florida into the sprawling behemoth it has become since the Magic Kingdom opened in 1967.

But is Walt Disney World a city? Although WDW has many of the hallmarks of an urban center—businesses, workers, a police and fire department, taxes, sewer and water systems, and, of course, lots and lots of people, we probably do not think of it as a city, not in any normal meaning of the word. But what do we mean by “city” anyway? Disney World might help us understand this most important concept in geography.

Although hundreds of thousands of visitors pass through WDW on a daily basis, only a few dozen people actually live within the 40 square miles of property that Walt Disney quietly purchased in central Florida in the mid-1960s. He envisioned the Magic Kingdom pretty much as it was built—a destination resort where parents and kids could visit, have a memorable experience, and spend some serious money. But his vision extended beyond Cinderella’s Castle, fireworks and the . He had intended EPCOT to have been an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” where people would be able to live and work in an idealized setting. But, after Walt died in 1966, his utopian plans were shelved in order to develop EPCOT as a theme park more attractive to adults than the Magic Kingdom. EPCOT would not become an urban utopia, no matter what Walt hoped for.

WDW’s massive population changes daily, and almost everyone who passes through has a “real” home somewhere else. But so what? Cities are dynamic. Many urban centers are packed with people in the daytime—working in offices, going to school, shopping—but empty out almost entirely after five o’clock. Does it matter that, on any given day, Disney World’s population spent the night either nearby or in an on-site hotel? Does it matter that, day after day, almost the entire population turns over as visitors come for a while, spend money, take pictures with Mickey, and then return home with memories and a sunburn? Something similar could be said for Venice and Mecca, both of which have far more daily visitors than residents and yet are undoubtedly cities. So, what is a city anyway?

Cities are relatively recent human phenomena. Hunters and gatherers did not live in permanent communities of any sort, and the demands of deriving food and shelter from the natural world kept the sizes of their communities small—a few dozen to a few hundred. It was the invention of agriculture between 12 and 15 thousand years ago that made permanent settlements possible, but these earliest farming communities were also quite small. Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey was settled about nine thousand years before the present, making it one of the earliest know permanent human settlements. Over the many generations of its existence as a human settlement, it was probably never home to more than nine thousand people. Private homes were built side by side with no room for streets or roads. To enter a home, one had to walk along the roof and enter down a ladder. No public spaces, temples, or government buildings have been discovered there in fifty years of careful excavation. The people who lived in Çatalhöyük were farmers who lived close together at night (presumably for the security that comes from living together) but who went out into the surrounding fields to work during the daytime.

There were probably many as yet undiscovered settlements like Çatalhöyük during the Neolithic Era, but cities did not emerge until the beginning of the Bronze Age when several inventions made it advantageous for people who were not farmers to live in larger, often walled communities. As tool made of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) replaced sharpened stones, farming became more efficient. Neolithic farmers could rarely produce more than what was needed to keep their own small communities alive. With bronze plows, scythes, and other tools, farming became more efficient. Farming communities could reliably produce a small surplus. This surplus could be traded with other communities, of course, which led to specialization and higher levels of production. A few communities or individuals with knowledge of metal work specialized in making bronze tools which they could exchange for grain and the occasional goat. Then, about five thousand years ago, for reasons that are not entirely understood, a few communities in Mesopotamia and along the Indus River in modern Pakistan started to coalesce into large, permanent cities. These cities had several things in common with one another and indeed with modern cities. The earliest cities had large public buildings and spaces which appear to have served ceremonial purposes. They possessed hierarchical organizations, with a king, a priesthood, warriors, craftspeople, merchants and slaves. Cities could not feed themselves, but they were able to extract food and other necessities of life from the agricultural hinterland that surrounded them. This was done through trade, but also through taxation. Because cities had organized armies—headed by the king—they could compel farmers to surrender part of their crops as taxes, and could expand the territory claimed by the city to include more distant farmers (and hunters), whose “surplus” could be similarly appropriated. Farmers and cities needed each other, but while farming had existed for thousands of years before the first cities, cities were, and still are, impossible without farming.

Cities represented a substantial increase in the organizational complexity. Villages can function informally. Village leaders emerge because they are smarter, stronger, or braver than everyone else, or perhaps because people like them. Villagers can talk with the leadership directly, argue a point, and decide to cooperate or not. Cities are different. As cities grew larger, organization became more complex. Kings could not know more than a few hundred people individually, and most people would see the king only from a distance, if at all. All of the work of government that a traditional village chieftain might do on a personal level had to be carried out by bureaucrats of one sort or another. As cities grew in size and strength, a few expanded their influence over other cities creating the first empires. Because they could extract tribute from many cities and towns, and because they could benefit from trade throughout the empire, these imperial cities grew larger, with more imposing temples, city walls, and ever more complex social structures, including laws, judges to apply the laws, and schools to teach writing and math—both of which were necessary for keeping track of all the complexity of urban life.

Some cities emerged in the ancient world as centers of trade. Others were the focus of religious activity or political power. Many combined multiple functions. Cities grew and thrived when they served a purpose. When that purpose ended—trade routes changed, governments were overthrown, ancient religions forgotten—the cities too began to decline, some to be abandoned altogether, others to re-emerge in a different generation on the ruins of the older settlement.

This dynamic never came to an end, but with the Industrial Revolution, cities came to serve new purposes. Modern industry, beginning in the Eighteenth Century, tended to be concentrated where energy, labor and raw materials could be brought together. In England, the earliest industrial machinery was powered by coal. This led to the growth of manufacturing cities like Manchester (in England) which was near major coal deposits. As factories grew, rural workers moved to Manchester and locations like it to become a new urban working class. By the Twentieth Century, industry came to be seen as a necessity for any city’s survival. But industry is not static. In the 1970s, automobile manufacturing, which had made cities like Detroit and Flint (both in Michigan) prosperous, began to shift, first to Japan and later to Korea and elsewhere in the United States. One by one, the massive factories that had employed thousands of Americans in highly skilled, well-paying jobs, began to close. The cities that depended on those jobs fell into steep decline.

By the end of the Twentieth Century, cities had come to serve many purposes. A few cities like Canberra (in Australia), and Washington, DC were built around the business of government and most people who live in such capital cities work, directly or indirectly, in support of the government. Other cities, like Pittsburgh and Detroit, were built around industries. A few, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, Bologna in Italy, and Cairo, Egypt, home since 970 of Al-Azhar University, grew up as centers of learning.

Some achieved their status as cultural and religious centers. Kyoto, Japan was the ancient capital of Japan, and while it no longer fulfills that political function, it continues to symbolize Japan’s unique identity as the Land of the Rising Sun. Rome, while serving as the political capital of modern Italy, is also the cultural and administrative heart of Roman Catholic Christianity. Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, is the focus of daily prayers and pilgrimage of over a billion Muslims, and Jerusalem is the spiritual home of Jews, Christians, Muslims.

Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles (all in the United States) as well as Yokohama in Japan, Shanghai in China, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and many more, are port cities. Most port cities are established where rivers flow into the sea (an estuary), creating natural harbors that allow ships to be docked and unloaded while also being protected from the crashing waves of the open sea. This tends to encourage cultural diversity in port cities, as they are naturally inviting to people from afar who initially do business there to stick around and make a home for themselves. If you look at a map of the East Coast of the United States, you will notice that all of the “real” cities along the coastline are built along natural harbors. However, Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, while today a bustling urban development, has always lacked natural harbor and thus receives virtually all of its income today from tourism, not trade.

Today, half of the world’s population lives in cities, but these urban populations still have to be supplied with food, clean water, and raw materials from the countryside.

This nighttime photograph of New York City and its environs gives us a few hints as to how complex this can be. From Richmond to Boston, city lights give evidence of the millions of people who make this stretch of the Atlantic seaboard their home. Keeping all of these people supplied with electricity, groceries, gasoline, and coffee requires contributions from agricultural landscapes far larger than the megalopolis that connects these cities with almost uninterrupted chains of fast food and used car lots.

Modern cities require infrastructures—the roads, bridges, ports, power lines and air terminals that keep everyone connected.

This map of the United States gives us clues as to the nature of this infrastructure. Cities are easily identified, from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the bright splotches that mark out America’s towns and cities. A closer look reveals that the bright city lights are linked by a less obvious grid of pin points that mark the interstate highway system and other road networks.

Most modern cities emerged out of political or economic necessity. Sometimes, like Savannah, Georgia or the city of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, or Salt Lake City they were planned and built to meet specific purposes. Streets were laid out and public spaces set aside before any building took place. Other cities seem to have grown up more or less by accident to meet immediate necessities and show little evidence of urban planning or intentional design. The city of Venice began in the Sixth Century CE as a refuge in the middle of the vast Venetian Lagoon. In order to escape the ravages of the Huns and other invading armies, refugees began to settle on a scattering of small islands. In order to build permanent houses, and to expand the area they had to build houses, they drove thousands of pilings deep into the mud, creating stable foundations for the homes they built. As the city grew and prospered in the Middle Ages, citizens of the “Most Serene Republic” continued to expand, tearing down small homes to build bigger homes, churches, and palaces. The city was built on a scattering of islands, so canals came to serve in the place of public roadways. Four hundred bridges connected the islands, but the city remained dependent on small boats called gondolas to move from one part of the city to another. Over the centuries, this accidental city became one of the most beautiful urban environments on the planet.

Origin and Influences of Urbanization

Site and Situation influence the origin, function, and growth of cities.

Changes in transportation and communication, population, migration, economic development and government policies influence urbanization.

Megacities

Metacities

Periphery Countries

Semiperiphery countries

Suburbanization

Urban Sprawl

decentralization: Edge Cities, exurbs, boomburbs

Globalization

World Cities

Global networds, linkages, processes.

Rank-Size rule

Primate City

Gravity

Christaller’s central place theory

Internal Structure of Cities

Burgess Concentric-zone model

Hoyt sector model

Harris and Ullman multiple-nuclei model

galactic city model

bid-rent theory

Residential buildings and patterns of land use reflect and shape city’s culture, technological capabilities, cycles of development.

Low and High Density Housing

Urban infilling

urban models from Latin America, SE Asia, Africa

Infrastructure and spatial patterns of economic and social development

Urban Design: sustainable design initiatives, zoning practices, mixed land use, walkability, transportation-oriented development, smart-growth policies.

New Urbanism

Greenbelts

Slow-growth cities.

Urban Design Initiatives have positive and negative attributes.

Urban Data: Quantative and Qualitative Data

Geographic Change in an urban environment

Housing and Housing discrimination: redlining, blockbusting, affordability, access to services, crime, environmental injustice, growth of disamenity zones and zones of abandonment.

Squatter settlemenents

Inclusionary zoning

Local food movements

Urban Renewal

Gentrification

Functional and geographic fragmentation of governments

Urban sustainability

Suburban Sprawl

Sanitation,

Climate change

air and water quality

Ecological foodprint

Energy Use of a city

Regional planning

Remediation and redevelopment of brownfields

Urban Growth Boundaries and farmland protection

Urban Heat Islands

Cities are complex, ever changing phenomenon. At the start of the Twentieth Century, cities were mostly compact settlements.

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